Biography of Ken Follet
Ken Follett is one of the world's most popular novelists. He has sold approximately 100 million books. His latest, World Without End, went straight to the No.1 position on bestseller lists in the USA, Spain, Italy and Germany.
He first hit the bestseller lists in 1978 with Eye of the Needle, a taut and original thriller with a memorable woman character in the central role. The book won the Edgar award and became an outstanding film starring Kate Nelligan and Donald Sutherland.
He went on to write four more bestselling thrillers: Triple; The Key to Rebecca; The Man from St Petersburg; and Lie Down with Lions. Cliff Robertson and David Soul starred in the miniseries of The Key to Rebecca. In 1994 Timothy Dalton, Omar Sharif and Marg Helgenberger starred in the miniseries of Lie Down with Lions.
He also wrote On Wings of Eagles, the true story of how two employees of Ross Perot were rescued from Iran during the revolution of 1979. This book was made into a miniseries with Richard Crenna as Ross Perot and Burt Lancaster as Colonel "Bull" Simons.
He then surprised readers by radically changing course with The Pillars of the Earth, a novel about building a cathedral in the Middle Ages. Published in September 1989 to rave reviews, it was on the New York Times bestseller list for eighteen weeks. It also reached the No. 1 position on lists in Canada, Great Britain and Italy, and was on the German bestseller list for six years. It was voted the third greatest book ever written by 250,000 viewers of the German television station ZDF in 2004, beaten only by The Lord of the Rings and the Bible. A similar poll conducted by the BBC placed it 33rd in a list of the one hundred greatest novels. In November 2007 it became most popular ever choice of the Oprah Winfrey Book Club, returning to No.1 on the New York Times bestseller list
After Pillars he abandoned the straightforward spy genre for a while, but his stories still had powerful narrative drive, strong women characters, and elements of suspense and intrigue. Night over Water, A Dangerous Fortune, and A Place Called Freedom  followed.
Then he returned to the thriller. The Third Twin was a scorching suspense novel about a young woman scientist who stumbles over a secret experiment in genetic engineering. Miniseries rights were sold to CBS for $1,400,000, a record price for four hours of television. The series, starring Kelly McGillis and Larry Hagman, was broadcast in the USA in November 1997. (Ken Follett appeared briefly as the butler.) In Publishing Trends' annual survey of international fiction bestsellers for 1997, The Third Twin was ranked No.2 in the world, beaten only by John Grisham's The Partner.
The Hammer of Eden, another nail-biting contemporary suspense story, came in 1998. Code to Zero (2000), about brainwashing and rocket science in the fifties, went to No.1 on bestseller lists in the USA, German and Italy, and film rights were snapped up by Doug Wick, producer of Gladiator, in a seven-figure deal. Jackdaws (2001), a World War Two spy story in the tradition of Eye of the Needle, won the Corine Prize for 2003. Film rights have been sold to Dino DeLaurentiis. Hornet Flight, about two young people who escape from German-occupied Denmark in a Hornet Moth biplane, is loosely based on a true story. It was published in December 2002. Whiteout, a contemporary thriller about the theft of a dangerous virus from a laboratory, was published in 2004.
World without End, the long-awaited sequel to The Pillars of the Earth, was published in October 2007. It is set in Kingsbridge, the fictional location of the cathedral in Pillars, and features the descendants of the original characters at the time of the Black Death. It was a No.1 bestseller in Italy, the USA, Germany and Spain, where it was the fastest-selling book ever published in the Spanish language, outstripping the last Harry Potter book.
In 2008 Ken was awarded the Olaguibel Prize by the Colegio Oficial de Arquitectos Vasco-Navarro for contributing to the promotion and awareness of architecture. A staute of him by the distinguished Spanish sculptor Casto Solano was unveiled in January 2008 outside the cathedral of Santa Maria in the Basque capital of Vitoria-Gasteiz in northern Spain.
His next project is his most ambitious yet. The Century Trilogy will tell the entire history of the twentieth century, seen through the eyes of three linked families: one British, one Russian-American, and one German. The first book, Fall of Giants, is expected to be published in 2010.
Ken Follett is married to Barbara Follett, the Member of Parliament for Stevenage in Hertfordshire. They live in a rambling rectory in Stevenage with two Labrador retrievers called Custard and Bess. They also have an eighteenth-century town house in London and a beach house in Antigua. Ken Follett is a lover of Shakespeare, and is often to be seen at the Globe Theatre in London. An enthusiastic amateur musician, he plays bass guitar in a band called Damn Right I Got the Blues, and appears occasionally with the folk group Clog Iron playing a bass balalaika.
He was Chair of the National Year of Reading 1998-99, a British government initiative to raise literacy levels. He is president of the Dyslexia Institute, Chair of the advisory committee of Reading is Fundamental (UK), a trustee of the National Literacy Trust, a member of The Welsh Academy, a board director of the National Academy of Writing, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. In 2007 he was awarded an honorary Doctorate in Literature (D.Litt.) by the University of Glamorgan, and a similar degree by Saginaw Valley State University, where his papers are kept in the Ken Follett Archive. He is active in numerous Stevenage charities and is a governor of Roebuck Primary School.
He was born on 5 June 1949 in Cardiff, Wales, the son of a tax inspector. He was educated at state schools and graduated from University College, London, with an Honours degree in philosophy. He was made a Fellow of the college in 1995.
He became a reporter, first with his home-town newspaper the South Wales Echo and later with the London Evening News. While working on the Evening News he wrote his first novel, which was published but did not become a bestseller. He then went to work for a small London publishing house, Everest Books, eventually becoming Deputy Managing Director. He continued to write novels in his spare time. Eye of the Needle was his eleventh book, and his first success.