Sebastian Failks

Sebastian Charles Faulks (born 20 April 1953) is a British novelist, journalist and broadcaster. He is most notable for his historical novels set in France – The Girl at the Lion d'Or, Birdsong and Charlotte Gray.

He has also published novels with a contemporary setting, most recently A Week in December (2009) and Paris Echo (2018), and a James Bond continuation novel, Devil May Care (2008), as well as a continuation of P. G. Wodehouse's Jeeves series, Jeeves and the Wedding Bells (2013). He was a team captain on BBC Radio 4 literary quiz The Write Stuff.

Biography
Early life
Faulks was born on 20 April 1953 in Donnington, Berkshire, to Peter Faulks and Pamela (née Lawless). His father was a decorated soldier (he won the Military Cross), who later became a solicitor and circuit judge. His brother Edward Faulks, Baron Faulks KC, a barrister, became a Conservative Government Minister in January 2014 in the Ministry of Justice. His uncle was Sir Neville Faulks, a High Court judge.

He was educated at Elstree School, Reading, and went on to Wellington College, Berkshire. He read English at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, of which he was made an honorary fellow in 2008. Whilst at Cambridge he participated in University Challenge, in which Emmanuel College lost in the opening round. Faulks commented that his team was most probably hampered by a trip to the pub before the show, as recommended by the show's producer.

Career
After graduating, Faulks worked as a teacher at a private school in Camden Town, and then as a journalist for the Daily and Sunday Telegraph. Faulks's first novel, A Trick of the Light, was published in 1984. He continued to work as a journalist, becoming the first literary editor of The Independent in 1986.[6] He became deputy editor of the Independent on Sunday in 1989; in the same year he published The Girl at the Lion d'Or, the first of his historical novels set in France. In 1991 he left The Independent. He wrote for various newspapers as a freelancer for the next ten years.

Following the success of Birdsong (1993), Faulks quit journalism to write full-time. He has since published eight novels, the most recent being Where My Heart Used to Beat (2015), Paris Echo (2018) and Snow Country (2021). Faulks was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1993 and appointed CBE for services to literature in 2002.

Faulks appears regularly on British TV and radio. He was a regular team captain on BBC Radio 4's literary quiz The Write Stuff (1998–2014).[10] The quiz involves the panellists each week writing a pastiche of the work of a selected author; Faulks has published a collection of his efforts as a book, Pistache (2006), which was described in The Scotsman as "a little treasure of a book. Faulks can catch, and caricature, another writers' fingerprints and foibles with a delicious precision that only a deep love of writing can teach.