Bernard Cornwell

Bernard Cornwell
Cornwell in 2013
Born	(1944-02-23) 23 February 1944 (age 73) London, England
Occupation	Author
Nationality	British, American
Genre	Historical fiction
Notable works	Sharpe
Website
www.bernardcornwell.net

Bernard Cornwell, OBE (born 23 February 1944) is an English author of historical novels and a history of the Waterloo Campaign. He is best known for his novels about Napoleonic Wars rifleman Richard Sharpe. Cornwell has written historical novels primarily of English history in five series and one series of contemporary thriller novels. A feature of his historical novels is an end note on how the novel matches or differs from history, for the re-telling, and what one might see at the modern site of the battles described in the novel. One series of historical novels is set in the American Civil War. He wrote a nonfiction book on the battle of Waterloo, in addition to the fictional story of the famous battle in the Sharpe Series. Two of the historical novel series have been adapted for television; the Sharpe television series by ITV and The Last Kingdom by BBC. He lives in the US with his wife. He alternates between Cape Cod, Massachusetts and Charleston, South Carolina.

Cornwell was born in London in 1944. His father was Canadian airman William Oughtred and his mother Dorothy Cornwell was English, a member of the Women's Auxiliary Air Force. He was adopted and brought up in Thundersley, Essex, by the Wiggins family, who were members of the Peculiar People, a strict sect who were pacifists and banned frivolity of all kinds and even medicine. After his adopted father died, he changed his last name by deed poll from Wiggins to Cornwell, his birth mother's maiden name. Prior to that, he used Bernard Cornwell as a pen name. Cornwell met his father for the first time when he was 58, after telling a journalist on a book tour "that what I wanted to see in Vancouver was my real father." There he met his half-siblings, with whom he shares many traits, and learned his genealogy.