Bernard Cornwell

Bernard Cornwell was born in London in 1944, the child of a Canadian airman and a British member of the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force. He was given up for adoption shortly after birth and raised in Thundersley, Essex by Joe and Marjorie Wiggins, who belonged to a small fundamentalist Christian sect called the Peculiar People. Cornwell has spoken openly about the strict, unhappy household this produced, and about the long road that eventually led him to trace and meet his biological parents in adulthood.

He read theology at London University, then taught briefly before joining BBC Television as a researcher in the late 1960s. Over the next decade he worked his way up to become Head of Current Affairs Television for BBC Northern Ireland, based in Belfast during the height of the Troubles. It was there, in the early 1980s, that he met Judy, an American visitor, and fell in love.

Judy was unable to leave the United States for family reasons, so Cornwell moved to America to be with her. Unable to get a green card and unable to take a conventional job, he began to write. The first novel he produced was Sharpe’s Eagle, published in 1981. It launched what would become a 40-year career and the creation of one of the most enduring characters in modern historical fiction.

Cornwell was appointed OBE in 2006 for services to literature. He divides his time between Cape Cod in Massachusetts and Charleston, South Carolina, and remains active as a writer.

13 novels, complete series. Published between 2004 and 2020, this is Cornwell’s epic of the birth of England. Set in the ninth and tenth centuries, it follows Uhtred of Bebbanburg, a Northumbrian noble’s son captured and raised by Danish Vikings, who finds himself caught between two cultures as Alfred the Great struggles to unite the Saxon kingdoms against Danish invasion.

Cornwell announced in 2020 that War Lord, the thirteenth book, would be the final novel in the series. He has since returned to the world with a companion volume, Uhtred’s Feast (2024), mixing Anglo-Saxon recipes with short narrative pieces.

The series was adapted by Netflix and the BBC as The Last Kingdom, starring Alexander Dreymon. The show ran for five seasons (2015 to 2022) and concluded with a feature-length film, Seven Kings Must Die (2023).

4 novels. A Hundred Years War series following Thomas of Hookton, a young English archer caught up in the search for the Holy Grail amid the great battles of fourteenth-century France.

Outside his major series, Cornwell has written a number of standalone historical novels covering periods from the Bronze Age to Shakespearean London. The most widely read include:

• Redcoat (1987): the American Revolution, set during the British occupation of Philadelphia.
• Stonehenge (1999): Bronze Age Britain and the building of the monument.
• Gallows Thief (2001): a murder mystery set in Regency London.
• Azincourt (2008, published in the US as Agincourt): the 1415 battle, told through the eyes of an English archer.
• Fools and Mortals (2017): Elizabethan London, told from the perspective of William Shakespeare’s younger brother Richard, an actor in the early theatre.

Several of Cornwell’s novels and series have been adapted for television:

• Sharpe (ITV, 1993 to 2008): sixteen feature-length episodes starring Sean Bean as Richard Sharpe. Adapted from many of the novels, with several original scripts.
• The Last Kingdom (BBC Two and Netflix, 2015 to 2022): five seasons, starring Alexander Dreymon as Uhtred of Bebbanburg. Concluded with the feature-length film Seven Kings Must Die on Netflix in 2023.
• The Winter King (MGM+, 2023): one season, based on the first novel of the Warlord Chronicles. Not renewed.