Carl Muller

Charles Sarvan (Independent Scholar - Asia)

Ed. by John Thieme, University of East Anglia
The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 10.3.4: Sri Lankan Writing and Culture.
Vol. editors: Claire Gallien (Université Paul Valéry Montpellier 3), Birte Heidemann (Technische Universität Dresden), Pavan Kumar Malreddy (J W Goethe University of Frankfurt), Delphine Munos (Université de Liège)

Dates

Born 22 Oct 1935
Died 2 Dec 2019
Activity 1993-2019

Places

Born in Sri Lanka
Active in Sri Lanka

Activities

Primary

Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Poet

Resources

Muller's Works

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Carl Muller was born on 22 October 1935 in Kandy, Sri Lanka (then Ceylon). He was the eldest of thirteen children fathered by a hard-drinking railway locomotive driver – the “Sonnaboy” of his fiction. (Biographical data is derived from personal correspondence with the author.) Though a voracious reader, and though he won a school prize for English, Muller’s temperament was not amenable to the discipline and docility of formal education. He was dismissed from three schools, and at the age of eighteen joined the Royal Ceylon Navy as a signalman: among the maritime experiences he recalls is being jailed in Bombay on a charge of drunk and disorderly conduct. Leaving the navy, he briefly served in the Ceylon Army, and then joined the Colombo Port Commission as a signals officer. A…

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925 words

Citation: Sarvan, Charles. "Carl Muller". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 17 September 2003; last revised 22 July 2022. [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=4953, accessed 21 November 2024.]