皮尔斯·保罗·里德

Piers Paul Read FRSL (born 7 March 1941) is a British 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. Read was educated at St. John's College, Cambridge, where he studied history.

Among his most popular works are the novels The Professor's Daughter, A Married Man, and A Season in the West. In addition to his written works, Read is also a dramatist and television scriptwriter. In recent years, he has produced a number of authorized biographies and popular history books which are intended for a general audience. Read has worked and lived in both the United Kingdom and the United States, where he published many of his recent works. Read was awarded the Sir Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize for The Junkers, the Hawthornden Prize and Somerset Maugham Award for Monk Dawson, the Thomas More Medal for Alive, and the Enid McLeod Award for The Free Frenchman.

Background

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 studied 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.

His stay in Berlin inspired his second novel The Junkers (1968, which won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize) and confirmed the general sympathy towards the Germans that he felt on account of his mother's part-German ancestry. On returning to England, he took a job as sub-editor on The Times Literary Supplement and shared a flat in Pimlico with Stoppard and Marlowe. In 1967–68, he spent a year in New York – an experience he used in his fourth novel The Professor's Daughter (1971).

Personal life

Read is a practising Catholic and has served on the board of Catholic charities such as Aid to the Church in Need (UK) and the National Catholic Library. He was Master and remains Vice-President of the Catholic Writers' Guild of England and Wales. He has served on the governing bodies of the Institute of Contemporary Arts (1971–1975), the Society of Authors (1973–1976) and the Royal Society of Literature (2001–2007).

In 1967, he married Emily Albertine, daughter of (Evelyn) Basil Boothby, CMG, British Ambassador to Iceland from 1962 to 1965, and descended from Sir William Boothby, 7th Baronet; her mother, Susan, was granddaughter of British Prime Minister H. H. Asquith. They live in London, and have two sons, including Albert Read, and two daughters. Read was romantically involved with a 15-year-old Anna Wintour when he was 24.

In 2005, he correctly predicted the election of Joseph Ratzinger as Pope Benedict XVI. In Read's 1988 WWII novel The Free Frenchman, the protagonist's Catholic faith plays an important part in political decisions and dilemmas during the German occupation of France, as well as in the protagonist's tangled relations with the women in his life.

Work

Early in his career, Read wrote a number of scripts for film and television – A Premeditated Crime (1967) for the German director Peter Lilienthal whom he met in Berlin; Coincidence (1968), The House on Highbury Hill (1971) and The Childhood Friend (1974) as Wednesday Plays for BBC television – the latter starring Anthony Hopkins who would also play the title role in the television adaptation of Read's A Married Man (1984). A short play The Class War was staged by the Questors Theatre Company in 1964, and his Margaret Clitherow was broadcast by Granada Television in 1977.

The greater part of Read's work has been in prose form. After his plotless first novel, Game in Heaven with Tussy Marx (1967), Read's fiction adopted a more traditional narrative structure with both contemporary and historical settings. Three of his historical novels – The Junkers (1968), Polonaise (1976), The Free Frenchman (1986), are set in Continental Europe around World War II; and Alice in Exile (2001) in Russia at the time of the Bolshevik Revolution. Read's contemporaneous novels – A Married Man (1979), A Season in the West (1988), and The Misogynist (2010) – are ironic critiques of the manners and morals of the English upper-middle classes.

There are elements of the thriller in The Villa Golitsyn (1981), On the Third Day (1990), A Patriot in Berlin (1995), Knights of the Cross (1997) and The Death of a Pope (2009), though these too show Read's historical, political and religious concerns. With Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors (1974), The Train Robbers (1978), and Ablaze: The Story of Chernobyl (1993) Read extended his range to reportage; to history with The Templars (1999) and The Dreyfus Affair (2012); and to biography with Alec Guinness: The Authorised Biography (2003). He has also contributed to moral and religious controversies with a pamphlet Quo Vadis: The Subversion of the Catholic Church (1991), and essays and articles collected in Hell and Other Destinations (2006).