Peter Mayle

Peter Mayle was born in Brighton in 1939, spent most of his career in advertising and then writing advertising copy, and retired to Provence in 1987. A Year in Provence (1989) was his first book of any kind.

The subject was simple: the first year in a farmhouse in the Luberon, navigating French builders, French bureaucracy, French neighbours, and French food. Mayle had the advertising copywriter's essential gift — the ability to describe something ordinary in a way that makes you want it intensely — and he applied it to Provençal food and landscape with results that were commercially extraordinary.

The book sold ten million copies in 40 languages. It triggered what the French tourist industry called the Mayle Effect — a significant increase in British (and subsequently American) visitors to the Luberon specifically. The region became so popular that Mayle and his wife left France for a period in the mid-1990s because their village had become unliveable with tourists.

Toujours Provence (1991) was the sequel. His subsequent books — Encore Provence (1999), Provence A-Z (2006) — continued the series with diminishing urgency. His Marseille crime novels (beginning with Chasing Cézanne, 1997) applied the same sensory richness to a more urban and darker Provence.

He was made a Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur by the French government in 2002, which he described as compensation for two years of mud and chaotic builders.