{"id":62,"date":"2008-02-21T11:41:01","date_gmt":"2008-02-21T11:41:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sebastianfaulks.rhgd.co.uk\/index.php\/about\/"},"modified":"2023-06-16T13:32:57","modified_gmt":"2023-06-16T12:32:57","slug":"about","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.sebastianfaulks.com\/about\/","title":{"rendered":"About Sebastian"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span class=\"wpsdc-drop-cap\">S<\/span>ebastian Faulks was born in Donnington, a village near Newbury in Berkshire on April 20, 1953. He was the younger son of Peter Faulks (1917-1998) and Pamela, n\u00e9e Lawless (1923-2003). Peter Faulks was a partner in the local law firm Pitman and Bazett. He had interrupted his legal training in 1939 to enlist with the Duke of Wellington\u2019s, a Yorkshire-based infantry regiment. He fought in Holland, France, North Africa, Italy, Palestine and Syria. He was awarded the Military Cross in Tunisia. He was wounded in North Africa and again when his company was in slit trenches at Anzio. He received further wounds when the Germans bombed the beachhead hospital while he was waiting to be evacuated. He made a full recovery and lived an active life, later sitting as a judge in London and Reading.<\/p>\n<p>Pamela Faulks was the only daughter of Philip Lawless, MC. He had served in the Artists Rifles in the First World War and captained Richmond Rugby Club. He was capped once by England in the second row. He was a sports reporter for <em>The Morning Post<\/em> and the <em>Daily Telegraph<\/em>, specialising in rugby and golf, which he played off a handicap of plus two. In 1945, he was reporting on the American advance into Germany across the Rhine at Remagem and was killed by enemy fire.<\/p>\n<p>\u2018I had a very happy childhood,\u2019 said Faulks. \u2018My parents were kind, humorous and affectionate. My brother Edward was a great companion. We only ever met one of our four grandparents. Two of them were dead and my mother was estranged from her own mother. There was a sense that everything was beginning again \u2013 a fresh start after the War. Edward and I were both obsessed by ball games, and in the summer we played cricket for about eight hours a days. I was shy, a loner, but quite content. I think the 1950s were a bit austere if you were grown up, but for a child it was a good time, with Hornby trains and Meccano (which I could never master). Then came the Beatles.\u2019<\/p>\n<p>Faulks\u2019s mother introduced her sons to books at a young age. She also took them to the theatre and to galleries in London. \u2018She had the full classical canon on vinyl and we absorbed all that, though we were much keener on pop music,\u2019 said Faulks. \u2018 \u201cPick of the Pops\u201d with Alan Freeman on Sunday afternoons was sacred. Later on, Edward had a rock band at school. My father was into books only, I think, not music so much \u2013 he liked Trollope, Waugh, Graham Greene. My mother knew all of Dickens backwards. Those characters were real people to her.\u2019<\/p>\n<p>Both brothers were educated at Elstree School near Reading. \u2018It was a demanding and old-fashioned school, and we both had to rise to the challenge,\u2019 said Faulks. \u2018I liked it very much; it was a formidable education.\u2019 Faulks went as top scholar to Wellington College in 1966 and in 1970 won an open exhibition to read English at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. He graduated in 1974, and was elected an Honorary Fellow in 2007.<\/p>\n<p>In the year between school and university he had studied in Paris and learned to speak French. After university he spent a year in Bristol, writing a novel. \u2018From the age of about fourteen, I had made up my mind. I was inspired by Dickens and D.H.Lawrence among others. I set my heart on being a novelist at that young age.\u2019 At the end of the year, he migrated to London where he found work teaching in a private school in Camden Town.<\/p>\n<p>After two years, he got a job running a small book club called the <em>New Fiction Society<\/em> which had been set up by the Arts Council to stimulate sales of literary fiction. He took over from the novelist David Hughes, who became a lifelong friend. In 1979 Faulks joined the staff of the\u00a0<em>Daily Telegraph<\/em> as the junior reporter on the diary column. \u2018I was still writing books in the evening and at weekends,\u2019 said Faulks, \u2018but they weren\u2019t much good.\u2019 He had also been given work as freelance book reviewer, first at the <em>Sunday Times<\/em>, then at the <em>Spectator<\/em> and <em>Books and Bookmen<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>He and Edward had been sharing a house, but went their different ways. \u2018I bought a small flat in Notting Hill,\u2019 said Faulks. \u2018I had no television and I was meant to just write at night. Eventually, at about the fourth attempt I wrote something publishable. I rang up a publisher called James Michie. I didn\u2019t really know how distinguished James was; he was just someone I\u2019d met at a party. But I later found out he\u2019d published Graham Greene and discovered Sylvia Plath. After some humming and hah-ing he accepted the book, which I called <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sebastianfaulks.com\/book\/a-trick-of-the-light\/\"><em>A Trick of the Light<\/em><\/a>. I was twenty-nine. I got the news in a phone booth on Holborn Viaduct. It was a good moment; it felt like the beginning of something at last, after a long and occasionally dispiriting apprenticeship.\u2019<\/p>\n<p>Faulks worked as a feature writer for the <em>Sunday Telegraph<\/em> from 1983 to 1986, when he went to join the <em>Independent<\/em> as Literary Editor. \u2018In its early days the <em>Independent<\/em> was a great place to be. We had such a good football team, apart from anything else. We won the Fleet Street league in our first year by beating the <em>Sun<\/em> in the last match.\u2019<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.sebastianfaulks.com\/book\/the-girl-at-the-lion-dor\/\"><em>The Girl at the Lion d\u2019Or<\/em><\/a> came out in 1989. The Bodley Head had ceased to function but James Michie introduced Faulks to a literary agent, Gillon Aitken, who placed the book with Hutchinson, who have been Faulks\u2019s publishers ever since. \u2018I was fortunate,\u2019 said Faulks, \u2018to have three friends of an older literary generation, David Hughes, James Michie and Gillon Aitken. Each provided encouragement in a different way.\u2019 Although <em>The Girl at the Lion d\u2019Or<\/em> was described by one paper as \u2018the most raved-about new novel for years\u2019, sales were modest and Faulks stayed with the <em>Independent<\/em>, becoming deputy editor of the Sunday paper when it launched in the same year. He left in 1991.<\/p>\n<p>He subsequently wrote a monthly column for the <em>Guardian<\/em>, then for two years a weekly one in the\u00a0 <em>Evening Standard<\/em> and had a short spell as film reviewer for the <em>Mail On Sunday<\/em>. However, following the success of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sebastianfaulks.com\/book\/birdsong\/\"><em>Birdsong<\/em><\/a>, he has been able to focus his energies on books. \u2018I haven\u2019t had a proper job for years and would now be unemployable,\u2019 he said in a 2005 interview.<\/p>\n<p>In 1989, he married Veronica Youlten, formerly his assistant on the <em>Independent<\/em> books pages, later an editor at the <em>Independent<\/em> magazine. They have three children: William (born 1990), Holly (born 1992) and Arthur (born 1996). They spent a year in south west France, near Agen, in 1995-96, while Faulks was writing <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sebastianfaulks.com\/book\/charlotte-gray\/\"><em>Charlotte Gray<\/em><\/a>, but have lived in London since then.<\/p>\n<p>Sebastian Faulks was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1993 and appointed CBE for services to literature in 2002. The Tavistock Clinic in association with the University of East London awarded him an honorary doctorate for his contribution to the understanding of psychiatry in <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sebastianfaulks.com\/book\/human-traces\/\"><em>Human Traces<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Edward Faulks read law at Oxford and has practised as a barrister in London since 1973. His practice, which is largely in the Appeal Court and the House of Lords, includes cases of professional negligence, clinical negligence, personal injury, education, police claims and claims arising from the Human Rights Act. He took silk in 1996 and was for ten years head of chambers at 1, Chancery Lane (<a href=\"http:\/\/www.1chancerylane.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">www.1chancerylane.com<\/a>). He married Catherine Turner in 1990, and they have two sons, Leo (born 1992) and Archie (born 1994).<\/p>\n<p>Edward Faulks was created a life peer in July 2010 and took his seat as Lord Faulks of Donnington.<\/p>\n<p><em>Image credit: Sebastian Faulks by <a href=\"https:\/\/stillmovingmedia.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Still Moving<\/a>.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Sebastian Faulks was born in Donnington, a village near Newbury in Berkshire on April 20, 1953. He was the younger son of Peter Faulks (1917-1998) and Pamela, n\u00e9e Lawless (1923-2003). Peter Faulks was a partner in the local law firm Pitman and Bazett. He had interrupted his legal training in 1939 to enlist with the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":962,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","template":"page-about.php","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-62","page","type-page","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v23.9 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>About Sebastian - The official website of the award-winning and best-selling novelist Sebastian Faulks<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Sebastian Faulks is a British novelist, journalist and broadcaster. Faulks is best known for his historical novels set in France \u2013 Birdsong and Charlotte Gray - as well as a James Bond continuation novel, Devil May Care, and a continuation of P.G. Wodehouse&#039;s Jeeves series, Jeeves and the Wedding Bells. 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