Francis Edward Wintle | |
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| Born | 1948 (age 76–77) Salisbury, England |
| Pen name | Edward Rutherfurd |
| Occupation | Writer |
| Nationality | British |
| Genre | Historical Fiction |
| Notable works | Sarum |
| Notable awards | Langum Prize for American Historical Fiction City of Zaragoza's International Historical Novel Honor Award |
| Website | |
| edwardrutherfurd | |
Francis Edward Wintle (born 1948), known by his pen name Edward Rutherfurd, [1] is an English novelist. He is best known as a writer of epic historical novels that span long periods of history but are set in particular places. His debut novel, Sarum , set the pattern for his work with a ten-thousand-year storyline.
Rutherfurd attended the University of Cambridge and Stanford Business School, where he earned a Sloan fellowship. [1] [2] After graduating he worked in political research, bookselling and publishing. [2] He abandoned his career in the book trade in 1983 and returned to his childhood home to write Sarum , a historical novel with a ten-thousand year story, set in the area around the ancient monument of Stonehenge and Salisbury. [3]
Sarum was published in 1987 and became an instant international best-seller, remaining for 23 weeks on the New York Times Bestseller List.[ citation needed ] Since then he produced seven more New York Times best-sellers: Russka , a novel of Russia; London ; The Forest , set in England's New Forest which lies close by Sarum; two novels, Dublin: Foundation (The Princes of Ireland) and Ireland: Awakening (The Rebels of Ireland), which cover the story of Ireland from the time just before Saint Patrick to the twentieth century; New York ; Paris; and China.
His books have sold more than fifteen million copies and been translated into twenty languages. [4] Rutherfurd settled near Dublin, Ireland, in the early 1990s, but currently divides his time between Europe and North America. [2]
New York: The Novel, won the Langum Prize for American Historical Fiction in 2009 [5] and was awarded the Washington Irving Medal for Literary Excellence, by the Saint Nicholas Society of the City of New York, in 2011. [6]
In 2015 Edward Rutherfurd was the recipient of the City of Zaragoza's International Historical Novel Honor Award "for his body of work in the field of the historical novel." [7]
Rutherfurd invents four to six fictional families and tells the stories of their descendants. Using this framework, he chronicles the history of a place, often from the beginning of civilisation to modern times – a kind of historical fiction inspired by the work of James Michener. [8]
Rutherfurd's novels are generally at least 500 pages in length and sometimes more than 1,000. Divided into a number of parts, each chapter represents a different era in the place where the novel is set. There is usually an extensive family tree in the introduction, with each generational line matching the corresponding chapters. [9] [10]
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