The Durrell family lived in India and Corfu, among other places, during the first half of the twentieth century. Their lives and travels were documented and made famous through their autobiographical writings, particularly by Lawrence and Gerald. Other members of the family became notable in their own right. The TV series My Family and Other Animals (1987), the television film My Family and Other Animals (2005), the largely fictionalized TV series The Durrells (2016–2019), and the documentary What the Durrells Did Next were based on these writings.
Lawrence Samuel Durrell, Louisa Durrell and their children were all born in India during the British Raj (the Durrell children were in fact fourth-generation settlers in India, their paternal grandmother Dora Johnstone and maternal grandfather George Dixie having also been born on the sub-continent).
Following Lawrence Samuel Durrell's death in 1928, Louisa Durrell and her three surviving younger children moved to the United Kingdom, where Lawrence had already been sent to be educated. In 1935, the Durrells moved to the Greek island of Corfu. They remained there until the summer of 1939, when the impending outbreak of World War II forced most of them to return to England. Gerald's autobiographical Corfu trilogy and several short stories give a somewhat fictionalised account of the family's time in Corfu, while Lawrence's Prospero's Cell, A Guide to the Landscape and Manners of the Island of Corcyra (1945) is assembled from his diaries and notebooks, mainly for the years 1937 and 1938.