C J Sansom
C J Sansom was born in 1952 and studied history at the University of Birmingham. He then trained and worked as a solicitor before beginning his literary output in earnest. His Shardlake series of novels mix history - namely the reign of Henry VIII and 16th century England - with the detective genre and using real historical figures and locations, he creates a new cocktail of historical crime fiction.
The first novel Dissolution, published in 2003, was nominated for two of the 'Crime Writers' Association's prestigious awards and received high praise. The chief protagonist Matthew Shardlake is a fictional hunchbacked lawyer enveloped in a world of genuine historical figures such as Henry VIII and Thomas Cromwell.
Sansom plunders the past as a new location for detective fiction and brings it to life by importing fantasy into the perceived truth of history. With artistic licence and meticulous research he paints an original version of these characters that are merely literary concepts to us anyway.
The following novel, Dark Fire published in 2004 won the 2005 Ellis Peters Historical Dagger awarded by the Crime Writers' Association. The other novels in the series are Sovereign, Revelation and Heartstone. Sansom was also 'very highly commended' by the Crime Writers' Association for the Shardlake series.
His other work includes Winter in Madrid, a thriller set in post-civil war Spain and he is presently consulting on a BBC adaptation of Dissolution. He currently lives in Sussex.
