Ken Follett

At 74 years old, Ken Follett has this physical status:

Kenneth Martin Follett, (born 5 June 1949), is a Welsh writer of thrillers and historical novels whose books have sold more than 160 million copies.

Many of his books have landed on the best seller lists.

For example, many of them in the United States reached the top spot on the New York Times Best Seller list, including Edge of Eternity, Fall of Giants, A Dangerous Fortune, The Key to Rebecca, The Winter of the World, and World Without End.

Early life and education

Follett was born in Cardiff, Wales, on June 5, 1949. He was the first child of Martin Follett, a tax inspector, and Lavinia (Veenie) Follett, who went on to have two more children, Hannah and James. He began reading early but did not persist until he reached his teens, barred from watching films and television by his Plymouth Brethren parents. As a ten-year-old boy, his family moved to London, and he began applying himself to his classes at Harrow Weald Grammar School and Poole Technical College.

He gained admission to University College London in 1967, where he learned philosophy and became interested in center-left politics. In 1968, he married Mary, and their son Emanuele was born in the same year. Follett completed a three-month post-graduate course in journalism and went to work as a trainee reporter in Cardiff on the South Wales Echo in 1970. Marie-Claire, a daughter of 1973, was born in 1973.

Public life

Follett is a founder of several organisations that promote literacy and writing, and he is actively involved in several organisations in Stevenage, France.

He has worked with many Stevenage charities and served as the Governor of Roebuck Primary School for ten years, as the Chair of Governors for four years.

Follett and 54 other public figures ostensibly signed an open letter sent in The Guardian on September 15, 2010, expressing their opposition to Pope Benedict XVI's state visit to the United Kingdom.

In addition, David Cameron's £25,000 to the Yvette Cooper campaign in the 2015 Labour Party (UK) leadership race, as well as another £25,000 from his wife Barbara Follett.

Follett's archival papers are on display at the Saginaw Valley State University in Michigan, United States. They include outline, first drafts, notes, and correspondence, as well as early copies of early books that are now out of print.

Personal life

Follett became interested in the Labour Party's activities in the late 1970s. Barbara Broer, a Labour Party official who became his second wife in 1984, met him in the course of his political life. She was first elected as a Member of Parliament in 1997, representing Stevenage. She was re-elected in 2001 and 2005, but she did not run in the 2010 general election. Follett himself, as well as a well-known Blairite, remains a prominent Labour supporter and fundraiser.

He is an amateur musician playing bass guitar for Damn Right I Got the Blues and appears on occasion with Clog Iron's Clog Iron playing a bass balalaika.

Follett lives in Hertfordshire, England.

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Career

After three years in Cardiff, he returned to London as a general-assignment reporter for the Evening News. He later left journalism for publication and became deputy managing director of Everest Books in London, finding the job unchallenging. He began writing fiction in the evenings and weekends as a hobby. He began writing books after finding extra money to fix his vehicle, and the publisher's advance told a fellow writer that a thriller was the amount needed for the repairs.

Eye of the Needle, a 1978 book that became an international bestseller and sold over ten million copies, made him both wealthy and internationally known, and internationally recognized.

Each of Follett's subsequent novels has risen to the top of the New York Times Best Seller list; a number have been modified for the screen; a few have been published for the iPad. He had written 44 books as of January 2018. The first five best sellers were spy dramas: Eye of the Needle (1978), Triple (1979), The Man from St. Petersburg (1982) and Lie Down with Lions (1986). On Wings of Eagles (1983), the true story of how two of Ross Perot's employees were rescued from Iran after the 1979 revolution. 1 The next three novels, Night Over Water (1991), A Dangerous Fortune (1993) and A Place Called Freedom (1995), were more historical than thriller, but he returned to the thriller genre with The Third Twin (1996), which in the Publishing Trends annual list of best-selling authors for 1997 was ranked No. 1 in the Publishing Trends annual survey of international fiction best-sellers for 1997. After John Grisham's book The Partner, we're back in the United States. The Hammer of Eden (1998), his next film in modern suspense, was followed by a Cold War thriller, Code to Zero (2000).

Follett brought Jackdaws (2001), a dramatic young Danish couple who escaped to Britain from Denmark in a refurbished Hornet Moth biplane with vital information about German radar, back to the Second World War II period. Whiteout (2004) is a contemporary thriller about the stealing of a deadly virus from a research lab.

Follett's first non-spy thriller, The Pillars of the Earth (1989), a book about a cathedral in a small English village during the 12th century, stunned his readers. The book was a huge success, received rave reviews, and was on the New York Times Best Seller list for eighteen weeks. It was on the best-seller lists in Canada, Britain, and Italy, and it was on the German best-seller list for six years. So far, it has sold 26 million copies. It was released as a computer game version by German programmer and publisher Daedalic Entertainment on August 16, 2017.

Its much-later sequel, World Without End (2007), is a sequel that comes to Kingsbridge 157 years later, and it includes the characters in Pillars' descendants. It focuses on a select group of people whose lives have been devastated by the Black Death, the disease that gripped Europe from the middle of the 14th century.

In September 2017, A Column of Fire, the next book in the series, was published. The tale, which began in 1558, follows Ned Willard and Margery Fitzgerald's love for the over half a century. It comes at a time when Europe is against Elizabethan England, and the queen finds herself befuddled by plots to dethrone her.

The Evening and the Morning (2020), a prequel to The Pillars of the Earth, is a fourth book in The Evening and the Morning. The story "concerns the gradual development of the town of Kingsbridge and of the many characters — priests, nobles, peasants, and slaves — who played significant roles" in the decade around 1000 AD. The book, as such, is "a solid underpinning to the later installments of the Kingsbridge series."

The series has been described as "as comprehensive an account of a civilization's origins — as you would find anywhere in popular fiction."

Follett's books, Fall of Giants, Winter of the World, and Edge of Eternity make up the Century Trilogy. Giants' fall (2010) followed five closely related families — Americans, German, Russian, English, and Welsh — as they moved through the First World War, the Russian Revolution, and the fight for women's suffrage. The fall of Giants, which were distributed in 14 countries simultaneously, was highly popular and topped several best-seller lists.

Winter of the World (2012) picks up where the first book left off as the nation's five linked families enter a period of massive social, political, and economic turmoil, beginning with Nazi Germany's rise and the Spanish Civil War and World War II's dramatic escalation, to the explosions of the American and Soviet atom bombs and the start of the long Cold War.

Edge of Eternity, the final novel in the 'Century' trilogy, follows those families through the events of the second half of the twentieth century, and was released on September 16, 2014. It chronicles five families' lives through the Cold War and civil rights movements, as well as the previous two books.

The increasing political ferocity of the British working class and the rise of the British Labour Party, which is represented in several of the first two volumes, as shown by the Williams Family, Welsh coal miners, of whom some of the viewpoint characters end up as Members of the British Parliament and one of them becomes a cabinet minister in Clement Attlee's post-WWII Labour government. However, the theme of British politics is almost absent from the third part of Edge of Eternity, which focuses on the Cold War on the one hand and the United States Civil Rights Movement on the other; for example, although the book does not mention Margaret Thatcher's ascension in 1979, it makes no mention at all.

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Awards

• 2018 — Made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2018 Birthday Honours for services to literature.
• 2013 — Made a Grand Master at the Edgar Awards in New York.
• 2012 — Winter of the World won the Qué Leer Prize for Best Translated Book of that year in Spain.
• 2010 — Fall of Giants won the Libri Golden Book Award for Best Fiction Title in Hungary that year.
• 2010 — Made a Grand Master at Thrillerfest V in New York.
• 2008 — Won the Olaguibel Prize for contributing to the promotion and awareness of architecture.
• 2008 — Made an Honorary Doctor of Literature by the University of Exeter.
• 2007 — Made an Honorary Doctor of Literature by the University of Glamorgan.
• 2007 — Made an Honorary Doctor of Literature by Saginaw Valley State University.
• 2003 — Jackdaws won the Corine Literature Prize in Bavaria.
• 1999 — Hammer of Eden won the Premio Bancarella literary prize in Italy.
• 1979 — Eye of the Needle won the Edgar Best Novel Award from the Mystery Writers of America.