Antony Beevor was educated at Winchester and Sandhurst, where he studied under John Keegan. A regular officer with the 11th Hussars, he left the Army to write. He has published four novels, and seven works of non-fiction. They include The Spanish Civil War; Inside the British Army; Crete—The Battle and the Resistance, which was awarded a Runciman Prize, and Paris After the Liberation, 1944-1949 (written with his wife Artemis Cooper). He has also been contributed to several books including The British Army, Manpower and Society into the Twenty-First Century, edited by Hew Strachan and to a forthcoming book on the Eastern Front in World War II in honour of the late John Erickson.

Stalingrad, first published in 1998, won the first Samuel Johnson Prize, the Wolfson Prize for History and the Hawthornden Prize for Literature in 1999. The British edition, a number one bestseller in both hardback and paperback, has so far sold over 600,000 copies, and the book has been translated into twenty-four languages. The Fall of Berlin 1945, published in 2002, was accompanied by a BBC Timewatch programme on his research into the subject. The book will also be appearing in twenty-four foreign editions. It was a No. 1 Bestseller in seven countries apart from Britain, and in the top five in another nine countries. The two books between them have already sold over two million copies. His latest book, The Mystery of Olga Chekhova, describes the experiences of the Chekhov and Knipper families from before the Russian revolution until after the Second World War.

Antony Beevor was made a Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et Lettres by the French government in 1997 and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1999. He was the 2002-2003 Lees-Knowles lecturer at Cambridge. In 2003, he received the first Longman-History Today Trustees' Award. He is a member of the management committee of the Society of Authors and of the London Library. He is also Visiting Professor at the School of History, Classics and Archaeology at Birkbeck College, University of London. In September 2003, he took over from Philip Pullman as Chairman of the Society of Authors. In July 2004, he received an Honorary Degree of Doctor of Letters from the University of Kent. He is currently a judge of the British Academy Book Prize and a member of the Samuel Johnson Prize steering committee.

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