25 Facts About Bernard Cornwell

1.

Bernard Cornwell was born on 23 February 1944 and is an English-American author of historical novels and a history of the Waterloo Campaign.

2.

Bernard Cornwell is best known for his novels about Napoleonic Wars rifleman Richard Sharpe.

3.

Bernard Cornwell has written The Saxon Stories, a series of 13 novels about the making of England.

4.

Bernard Cornwell has written historical novels primarily based on English history, in five series, and one series of contemporary thriller novels.

5.

Bernard Cornwell wrote a nonfiction book on the battle of Waterloo, in addition to the fictional story of the famous battle in the Sharpe series.

6.

Bernard Cornwell's father was Canadian airman William Oughtred and his mother was Englishwoman Dorothy Cornwell, a member of the Women's Auxiliary Air Force.

7.

Bernard Cornwell was adopted and brought up in Thundersley, Essex, by the Wiggins family; they were members of the Peculiar People, a strict sect of pacifists who banned frivolity of all kinds, and even medicine up to 1930.

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8.

Bernard Cornwell read history at University College London between 1963 and 1966 and worked as a teacher after graduating.

9.

Bernard Cornwell attempted to enlist in the British armed services at least three times but was rejected on the grounds of myopia.

10.

Bernard Cornwell then joined Thames Television as editor of Thames News.

11.

Bernard Cornwell met his second wife, Judy, in 1978 in Edinburgh while he was working for BBC Northern Ireland; she was a travel agent from the US and the mother of three children from a previous marriage.

12.

Bernard Cornwell relocated to the United States in 1979 after marrying her.

13.

Bernard Cornwell was unable to get a United States Permanent Resident Card, so he started writing novels, as this did not require a work permit.

14.

Bernard Cornwell originally planned to start the series with the Siege of Badajoz but decided instead to begin with a couple of "warm-up" novels.

15.

Bernard Cornwell went on to tell the story of Badajoz in Sharpe's Company published in 1982.

16.

Bernard Cornwell published Redcoat in 1987, an American Revolutionary War novel set in Philadelphia during its 1777 occupation by the British.

17.

Bernard Cornwell was approached by a production company interested in making television adaptations of the first eight books of his Sharpe series.

18.

Bernard Cornwell wrote two books a year for a long time, slowing to one per year in his sixties.

19.

Bernard Cornwell took that as a compliment and an accurate appraisal of the difference between the style of O'Brian and his own, while appreciating the association with Forester.

20.

Bernard Cornwell has been extremely successful in his writing career, selling 30 million books by 2015 throughout the various series and individual novels, and he continues to write new novels.

21.

Bernard Cornwell was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in the 2006 Birthday Honours for services to literature and television production.

22.

Subsequently, Bernard Cornwell wrote Sharpe's Tiger, Sharpe's Triumph, Sharpe's Fortress, Sharpe's Trafalgar, and Sharpe's Prey, depicting Sharpe's earlier adventures under Wellington's command in India, including his hard-won promotion to the officer corps, his return to Britain, and his arrival in the 95th Rifles; he wrote the sequel Sharpe's Devil, set six years after the end of the wars.

23.

Bernard Cornwell has admitted that he subtly changed the writing of the character to align with Bean's portrayal as now he "could not imagine Sharpe as anyone else".

24.

Bernard Cornwell realised that most English people are unaware of how England came to be, rather than say, Dane-land, in that era of multiple peoples on the island of Great Britain.

25.

Bernard Cornwell is a traditional sailor and enjoys sailing his Cornish Crabber christened Royalist.

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