Joseph Conrad, born Jozef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski in partitioned Poland was a naturalized British subject, for whom English was a third language. 

Writing on the cusp of Victorianism and Modernism, Conrad made his name as the  writer of exotic romances, and sea fiction, and then reinvented himself  in the great political fiction of the early twentieth century.   Critically acclaimed, he subsequently found the public popularity he had so long sought fairly late in his career, and across the range of his  work left an indelible mark on English Letters as the author of some landmark texts.