Joseph Conrad was born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, in Berdychiv, a town that was then part of the Russian Empire and is now in Ukraine. His parents were Polish patriots. His father, a poet and translator, was arrested for his part in the movement for Polish independence and sent into exile in northern Russia, and the family went with him. Conrad’s mother died when he was seven, his father when he was eleven.

At sixteen, the orphaned boy left for Marseille to go to sea, and for the next twenty years he was a sailor. He joined the British merchant navy, sailed to Australia, the Malay Archipelago and the Gulf of Siam, earned his master’s certificate, and became a British subject. He spoke Polish and French before he learned English, which he only started to pick up in his twenties.

In 1890 he took a job commanding a river steamer in the Congo Free State, then the private possession of King Leopold II of Belgium. What he saw there of the brutal extraction of ivory and rubber made him ill in body and spirit. Nine years later it became Heart of Darkness, the story of Marlow’s journey up a great river to find the ivory trader Kurtz.

Conrad’s first novel, Almayer’s Folly, came out in 1895, when he was thirty-seven. He then gave up the sea and wrote, slowly and in great anxiety about money, a remarkable series of books: Lord Jim (1900), about a young officer who abandons a ship full of pilgrims and spends his life trying to redeem himself; Nostromo (1904), set in an imaginary South American republic; and The Secret Agent (1907), about anarchists and spies in London.

In 1897, in a preface to one of his early sea novels, he set out what he was trying to do. His task, he wrote, was “by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel—it is, before all, to make you see.” Writers still return to that sentence. Conrad died in 1924, still writing in his third language.