Bernard Cornwell

Bernard Cornwell (born London, 1944) is an English novelist and former journalist, best known for the Sharpe series about a rifleman in the Napoleonic Wars. His books mix adventure fiction with a careful attention to historical detail, and they have found readers well beyond Britain.

He was born in London to a Canadian airman and to a woman who served in the Women's Auxiliary Air Force, and he lost both parents while still very young. He was brought up in Essex by the Wiggins family, members of the Peculiar People, a strict sect of pacifists, and as an adult he described himself as an atheist. He read history at University College London, worked as a teacher, and later joined the BBC and Thames Television as a journalist.

He moved to the United States in 1979 after marrying his second wife, Judy. Unable to obtain a green card, he found that writing novels was the one way he could earn a living legally, as he has often explained. His first major series grew out of a childhood love of C. S. Forester's Hornblower novels: he wanted an army counterpart. The Sharpe books were adapted for television with Sean Bean in the lead.

He later wrote other series, including Arthurian novels, the adventures of an archer in the Hundred Years' War and, most notably, The Saxon Stories, which trace the birth of England under Alfred the Great through Uhtred of Bebbanburg. His method pairs a big story, the real events, with a little story, a fictional plot, and he usually adds an end note on what history confirms or changes. He has sold around thirty million books, and in 2006 he was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire.