Bernard Cornwell’s historical tales, set an several different eras, have won him a huge following both in the UK and around the world. His latest, Azincourt (he opts for the traditional French spelling rather than the more familiar Anglicised version) topped the hardback fiction charts on release and now sees him up for the Sainsbury’s Popular Fiction Award.
The majority of his fans discovered him through rifleman Richard Sharpe. The Sharpe books, set in the Napoleonic era, now number 21 (and one short story, Sharpe’s Christmas) and were very successfully adapted for television, with Sean Bean taking the title role.
He’s also penned a number of other series. The Starbuck Chronicles take the American Civil War as a backdrop; his Grail Quest sequence plays out during the Hundred Years War; Alfred’s Wessex is the setting to the Saxon Stories, to which he’s currently in the midst of writing an addition. But his own favourite, he reveals in an interview for a Massachusetts website, are the three books of the Warlord Chronicles, set in Arthurian Britain.
In the same article, he also reveals a fondness for a rival historical series, C J Sansom’s Shardlake series. He clearly appreciates the talents of his fellow writers: he is, rather splendidly, quoted on the jackets of most of Simon Scarrow’s novels as saying “I really could do without this sort of competition”!
But Simon Scarrow – whose most recent novel was stopped from being his first no.1 only by Jeffrey Archer – is not his competition for the Nibbie. His rivals here are Sebastian Faulks, Sadie Jones, Elizabeth Noble, Cecelia Ahern and previous winner Marian Keyes. Tune in to Watch (Sky Channel 109, Virgin TV 124) at 8pm this Sunday to find out who takes home the trophy.
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