Author Bios

Candice Millard is an American narrative historian and former editor at National Geographic magazine whose books have established her as one of the finest practitioners of popular history writing in contemporary American letters. Her gift is for finding true stories of extraordinary physical and moral extremity — stories involving courage, suffering, and death in remote…

William Dalrymple is one of the most celebrated writers on South Asia and the Islamic world working in English today, a Scottish historian and travel writer whose books combine the breadth of serious scholarship with the immediacy and narrative energy of the best literary journalism. Born in Scotland in 1965 and educated at Ampleforth and…

Michael Neiberg is a leading American military historian of the First and Second World Wars, a scholar whose work combines archival rigor with genuine narrative skill to produce military history that is both scholarly sound and accessible to general readers. He is a professor of history at the United States Army War College at Carlisle,…

Pamela Rotner Sakamoto is an American historian and author who has devoted her scholarly career to recovering the stories of individuals whose lives illuminate the human dimensions of the Second World War in Asia and the Pacific, paying particular attention to figures whose experiences crossed national, cultural, and ethical boundaries in ways that conventional national…

Rinker Buck is an American journalist and author who has built a distinctive career around firsthand adventures with historical machinery and the open landscapes of American history. Born in New Jersey in 1950 into an aviation family — his father was a barnstormer who taught all his sons to fly — he grew up with…

Sir Steven Runciman was the preeminent English-language historian of the Crusades and of Byzantine civilization in the twentieth century, a scholar whose combination of prodigious erudition, literary elegance, and grand narrative ambition produced historical works that have never been superseded as either scholarship or literature. Born in 1903 in Northumberland into a distinguished Liberal political…

Laura Ingalls Wilder was an American author whose Little House on the Prairie series of semi-autobiographical novels, written in her sixties and seventies, became among the most beloved works of children’s literature in the English language and created a mythology of the American frontier that has shaped the cultural imagination of generations of readers worldwide….

Tony Horwitz was an American journalist and narrative historian who brought to the writing of American history a reporter’s eye for the telling detail, a comic sensibility that never trivialized its subjects, and a genuine gift for illuminating the present through the past. Born in 1958 in Washington, D.C., he studied at Brown University and…

Winston S. Churchill was one of the most consequential political leaders of the twentieth century and, as the recipient of the 1953 Nobel Prize in Literature, one of its most celebrated writers — a combination that makes him a figure without precedent in modern history. Born in 1874 at Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire, the son…

Christian Wolmar is Britain’s leading writer on railways and transport history, an author and journalist whose work has done more than that of any other contemporary writer to bring the history and politics of rail transport to a broad general readership. Born in Paris in 1947 to Russian émigré parents and raised in Britain, he…