Piers Paul Read, third son of poet and art critic Sir Herbert Read, was born in 1941, raised in North Yorkshire, and educated by Benedictine monks at Ampleforth College. His fiction has won the Hawthornden Prize, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, the Somerset Maugham Award, and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Two of his novels, A Married Man and The Free Frenchman, have been adapted for television and a third, Monk Dawson, as a feature film. Read is a fellow and member of the Council of the Royal Society of Literature and a member of the Council of the Society of Authors. He lives in London.