Bernard cornwell biography book

One of the cool things about interviewing people for a living is that you occasionally get to make your teenage self very happy. I was round about 12 years old when I absentmindedly picked up a copy of Sharpe’s Prey that my grandfather had left behind after a recent visit. From the opening chapter, in which an English fencing master is brutally murdered, the book grabbed me by the tender parts and never let go. 

Bringing a copy of Sharpe’s Tiger on a family holiday to Turkey confirmed the love affair – Sharpe gets flogged! Blows up a fortress! Fights the titular tiger! – and I subsequently spent a significant portion of my adolescence in the company of Bernard Cornwell and his protagonists. Sharpe, obviously, but also Derfel Cadarn (who fought the Saxons with King Arthur), Uhtred of Bebbanburg (who fought the Vikings with Alfred the Great), Thomas of Hookton (who fought in the Hundred Years’ War and found the Holy Grail).   

Cornwell’s protagonists like fighting. They are good at fighting. (Other than Nathaniel Starbuck – American Civil War – who doesn’t like fighting in the first book but swiftly gets the knack.) They kill a lot of people, mostly enemy soldiers, occasionally rotters on their own side, and while introspection may sometimes trouble their conscience it tends to pass pretty quickly. They are always male. They are always tall. They are prodigious swordsmen on the battlefield and in the boudoir. While fictional themselves, they fight in historical battles – often playing a crucial role in victory – and encounter historically accurate characters.  

There’s a strategically brilliant commander whose life is intertwined with the protagonist. (The Duke of Wellington, Kings Alfred, Arthur and Edward III.) There’s invariably a beautiful girl to be wooed (that normally happens around halfway through) and a tremendously evil villain to be dispatched (that happens at the end). There are hits, and

The first of Richard Sharpe's Indian adventures, pitting him against the Tippoo Sultan in the siege of Seringapatam, 1799.

Sharpe, now a sergeant, finds himself alongside Sir Arthur Wellesley at the terrifying Battle of Assaye.

Sharpe's first story as an officer takes him to the daunting fort of Gawilghur. This is also the last of his Indian adventures.

Sharpe has to go home from India, and he would have left in 1805 and Cape Trafalgar lies on his way home, so why should he not be there at the right time?

This tells the tale of one of the most obscure campaigns of the whole of the Napoleonic wars. The Danes had a huge merchant fleet, second only in size to Great Britain's, and to protect it they possessed a formidable navy. But Denmark was a very small country and when, in 1807, the French decide they will invade Denmark and take the fleet for themselves, Britain has to act swiftly. Swiftly, but not particularly justly.

The beginning of the Peninsular War (the battles between 1808 and 1814 to expel the French from Portugal and Spain). The Peninsular Campaign occupies most of the Sharpe series and this book begins during the infamous retreat to Corunna. Sharpe and a group of the 95th Rifles become separated from the army and are forced to navigate

British writer (born 1944)

Bernard CornwellOBE (born 23 February 1944) is an English author of historical novels and a history of the Waterloo Campaign. He is best known for his long-running series of novels about Napoleonic Wars rifleman Richard Sharpe. He has also written The Saxon Stories, a series of thirteen novels about the unification of England.

He has written historical novels primarily based on English history, in five series, and one series of contemporary thriller novels. A feature of his historical novels is an end note on how they match or differ from history, and what one might see at the modern sites of the events described. He wrote a nonfiction book on the battle of Waterloo, in addition to the fictional story of the famous battle in the Sharpe series. Three of the historical novel series have been adapted for television: the Sharpe television series by ITV, The Last Kingdom by BBC and The Winter King for MGM+. He lives in the US with his wife, alternating between Cape Cod, Massachusetts, and Charleston, South Carolina.

Biography

Cornwell was born in London in 1944. His father was Canadian airman William Oughtred and his mother was Englishwoman Dorothy Cornwell, a member of the Women's Auxiliary Air Force. He was adopted and brought up in Thundersley, Essex, by the Wiggins family; they were members of the Peculiar People, a strict sect of pacifists who banned frivolity of all kinds, and even medicine up to 1930. Reacting to being raised by Christian Fundamentalists, he grew up rejecting all religions and became an atheist.

After his adoptive father died, he changed his last name by deed poll from Wiggins to Cornwell, his birth mother's maiden name. Prior to that, he had used Bernard Cornwell as a pen name. He met his father for the first time when he was 58, after telling a journalist on a book tour, "what I wanted to see in Vancouver was my real father."^&