Piers Paul Read
| Piers Paul Read | |
|---|---|
| Born |
7 March 1941 Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire, England, United Kingdom |
| Occupation | Novelist, historian, biographer |
Piers Paul Read FRSL (born 7 March 1941) is an award-winning English novelist, historian and biographer.
He was first noted in 1974 for a book of reportage Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors, later adapted as a feature-film and a documentary. This was followed by some well-acclaimed novels that criticised English middle-class ethics from the less-usual viewpoint of a right-wing practising Catholic, with sin and redemption as recurring themes.
Among his most popular works are The Professor's Daughter, A Married Man, and A Season in the West. Read is also a dramatist and television scriptwriter.
Piers Paul Read was born in Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire. He is the third son of Sir Herbert Read, a poet, art critic and theorist of anarchism, and Margaret Read (née Ludwig), a professional musician. His mother was a convert to Roman Catholicism and he was raised in that religion.
When Read was eight, his family moved to North Yorkshire. He was educated by Benedictine monks at Gilling Castle and Ampleforth College. His years at Ampleforth would later provide much of the material for the first part of his third novel Monk Dawson (1969) and rural Ryedale was the setting of his fifth novel, The Upstart (1973). In 1959 he went to St John's College, Cambridge, where he read history. He received his B.A. in 1961 and M.A. in 1962. In 1963–64, he spent a year in West Berlin on a Ford Foundation Fellowship. There he came into contact with German writers in the Gruppe 47, the French nouveau romancier Michel Butor, and the Polish novelist, diarist and playwright, Witold Gombrowicz.; and worked on his first novel Game in Heaven with Tussy Marx (1966). He later enrolled in an academy for writers funded by the Ford Foundation, the Literarisches Colloquium, where he made friends with fellow members Tom Stoppard and Derek Marlowe
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