Prior to that, he had used Bernard Cornwell as a pen name. Īfter his adoptive father died, he changed his last name by deed poll from Wiggins to Cornwell, his birth mother's maiden name. Reacting to being raised by Christian Fundamentalists, he grew up rejecting all religions and became an atheist.

He 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. His father was Canadian airman William Oughtred and his mother was Englishwoman Dorothy Cornwell, a member of the Women's Auxiliary Air Force. Biography Ĭornwell was born in London in 1944. He lives in the US with his wife, alternating between Cape Cod, Massachusetts, and Charleston, South Carolina. Two of the historical novel series have been adapted for television: the Sharpe television series by ITV and The Last Kingdom by BBC. He wrote a nonfiction book on the battle of Waterloo, in addition to the fictional story of the famous battle in the Sharpe series.

A feature of his historical novels is an end note on how they match or differ from history, and what one might see at the modern sites of the events described. He has written historical novels primarily based on English history, in five series, and one series of contemporary thriller novels. He has also written The Saxon Stories, a series of 13 novels about the making of England.

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

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

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