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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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 18 April 2024.]
