Kenneth Martin Follett (born 5 June 1949) is a Welsh author of thrillers and historical novels who has sold more than 160 million copies of his works.[1]
Follett's commercial breakthrough came with the spy thrillerEye of the Needle (1978). After writing more best-sellers in the genre in the 1980s, he branched into historical fiction with The Pillars of the Earth (1989), an epic set in medieval England which became his best-known work and the first published in the Kingsbridge series. He has continued to write in both genres, including the Century Trilogy. Many of his books have achieved high ranking on bestseller lists, including the number-one position on the New York Times Best Seller list.[a]
Early life and education
Follett was born on 5 June 1949 in Cardiff, Wales. He was the first child of Martin Follett, a tax inspector, and Lavinia (Veenie) Follett, who went on to have two more children, Hannah and James.[3][4] Barred from watching films and television by his Plymouth Brethren parents, he developed an early interest in reading but remained an indifferent student until he entered his teens.[3][4] His family moved to London when he was ten years old, and he began applying himself to his studies at Harrow Weald Grammar School and Poole Technical College.
He won admission in 1967 to University College London, where he studied philosophy and became involved in centre-left politics. He married Mary, in 1968, and their son Emanuele was born in the same year. After graduation in the autumn of 1970, Follett took a three-month post-graduate course in journalism and went to work as a trainee reporter in Cardiff on the South Wales Echo. In 1973 a daughter, Marie-Claire, was born.
Career
After three years in Cardiff, he returned to London as a general-assignment reporter for the Evening News. Finding the work unchallenging, he eventually left journalism for publishing and became, by the late 1970s, deputy managing director of the small London publisher Everest Books.[3] He began writing fiction during evenings and weekends as a hobby. Later, he said, he began writing books when he needed £200 to fix his car, and the publishers' advance a fellow journalist had been paid for a thriller was £200.[5]
Further successes
Success came gradually at first, but the 1978 publication of Eye of the Needle, which became an international bestseller and sold over 10 million copies, made him both wealthy and internationally famous.[6]
Follett with the German edition of his book Whiteout in October 2005
Follett returned to the Second World War era with his next two novels, Jackdaws (2001), a thriller about a group of women parachuted into France to destroy a vital telephone exchange – which won the Corine Literature Prize for 2003 – and Hornet Flight (2002), about a daring young Danish couple who escape to Britain from occupied Denmark in a rebuilt Hornet Moth biplane with vital information about German radar. Whiteout (2004) is a contemporary thriller about the theft of a deadly virus from a research lab.
Follett surprised his readers with his first non-spy thriller, The Pillars of the Earth (1989), a novel about building a cathedral in a small English village during the Anarchy in the 12th century. The novel was highly successful, received positive reviews and was on The New York Times Best Seller list for eighteen weeks. It topped best-seller lists in Canada, Britain and Italy, and was on the German best-seller list for six years. As of 2017 it has sold 26 million copies.[8] On 16 August 2017, a published as a computer game adaptation by German developer and publisher Daedalic Entertainment was released.[9]
Its much-later sequel,[10]World Without End (2007), returns to Kingsbridge 157 years later, and features the descendants of the characters in Pillars. It focuses on the destinies of a handful of people as their lives are devastated by the Black Death, the plague that swept Europe from the middle of the 14th century.
The next novel in the series, A Column of Fire,[11] was published in September 2017.[11] Beginning in 1558, the story follows the romance between Ned Willard and Margery Fitzgerald over half a century. It commences at a time when Europe turns against Elizabethan England, and the queen finds herself beset by plots to dethrone her.[12]
A fourth novel, The Evening and the Morning (2020), is a prequel to The Pillars of the Earth. Set in the decade around 1000 AD – in the so-called Dark Ages – the story "concerns the gradual creation of the town of Kingsbridge and of the many people – priests, nobles, peasants, the enslaved – who played significant roles".[13] As such, the book provides "a solid underpinning to the later installments of the Kingsbridge series".[13]
The series has been described as being "as comprehensive an account of the building of a civilization – with its laws, structures, customs and beliefs – as you are likely to encounter anywhere in popular fiction".[13]
Century trilogy
Follett's novels, Fall of Giants, Winter of the World and Edge of Eternity, make up the Century Trilogy. Fall of Giants (2010) followed the fates of five interrelated families – American, German, Russian, English and Welsh – as they moved through the world-shaking dramas of the First World War, the Russian Revolution and the struggle for women's suffrage. Fall of Giants, published simultaneously in 14 countries, was internationally popular and topped several best-seller lists.[15]
Winter of the World (2012) picks up where the first book left off, as its five interrelated families enter a time of enormous social, political, and economic turmoil, beginning with the rise of Nazi Germany, through the Spanish Civil War and the great dramas of World War II, to the explosions of the American and Soviet atom bombs and the beginning of the long Cold War.
The final novel in the 'Century' trilogy, Edge of Eternity, which follows those families through the events of the second half of the 20th century, was published on 16 September 2014. Like the previous two books, it chronicles the lives of five families through the Cold War and civil-rights movements.[16]
A major element of the first two volumes, Fall of Giants and Winter of the World, is the increasing political assertiveness of the British working class and the rise of the British Labour Party – exemplified by the Williams Family, Welsh coal miners, of which several viewpoint characters end up as Members of the British Parliament and one of them becomes a cabinet minister in Clement Attlee's post-WWII Labour government. However, the theme of British politics is nearly absent from the third part Edge of Eternity, which concentrates on the Cold War on the one hand and the US Civil Rights Movement on the other; for example, though the novel continues until 1989, it makes no reference at all to the rise of Margaret Thatcher in 1979.
Adaptations
Follett has had a number of novels made into films and television mini series: Eye of the Needle was made into an acclaimed film, starring Donald Sutherland, and six novels have been made into television mini-series: The Key to Rebecca, Lie Down with Lions, On Wings of Eagles (1986), The Third Twin – the rights for which were sold to CBS for $US1,400,000, a record price at the time – and The Pillars of the Earth (2010) and World Without End (2012).
A video game adaptation titled Ken Follett's The Pillars of the Earth, developed and published by German studio Daedalic Entertainment, was released in three parts from 2017 to 2018.
Follett had cameo roles as the valet in The Third Twin and later as a merchant in The Pillars of the Earth. In 2016, A Dangerous Fortune was also adapted.[17]
Pillars of the Earth and A Column of Fire have both been adapted into Danish-language musicals. Pillars of the Earth had its world premiere October 12, 2016 at Østre Gasværk Teater, Copenhagen.[18]A Column of Fire had its world premiere in 2019 at Bellevue Teatret, Klampenborg.[19] Both of the musicals were written by Thomas Høg, Lasse Aagaard, and Sune Svanekier.
Public life
Follett is a member of various organisations that promote literacy and writing, and is actively involved in various organisations in his home town of Stevenage.
Chair of the National Year of Reading 1998–99, a British government initiative to raise literacy levels.[20]
He is active in numerous Stevenage charities and was a governor of Roebuck Primary School for ten years, serving as the Chair of Governors for four of those years.
On 15 September 2010, Follett, along with 54 other public figures, signed an open letter published in The Guardian stating their opposition to Pope Benedict XVI's state visit to the UK.[22]
Follett's archival papers are housed at the Saginaw Valley State University in Michigan, United States. They include outlines, first drafts, notes and correspondence, original manuscripts, and copies of early books now out of print.[25]
Follett became involved, during the late 1970s, in the activities of Britain's Labour Party. In the course of his political activities, he met Barbara Broer, a Labour Party official, who became his second wife in 1984. She was elected as a Member of Parliament in 1997, representing Stevenage. She was re-elected in both 2001 and 2005, but did not stand in the 2010 general election.[33] Follett himself remains a prominent Labour supporter and fundraiser as well as a prominent Blairite.
During university, Follett rebelled against his parents' "puritanical faith" and became an atheist. As of 2022, he is "still an atheist, but I do have a spiritual life".[34]
He is an amateur musician playing bass guitar for Damn Right I Got the Blues, and appears occasionally with the folk group Clog Iron playing a bass balalaika.[35]
The Heist of the Century (1978) (with René Louis Maurice, others) (a.k.a. The Gentleman of 16 July (U.S.), Under the Stars of Nice, Robbery Under the Streets of Nice, and Cinq Milliards au bout de l'égout (1977).[39] Translation from original French version.
^"THE LIBRARY: The Heist of the Century". Archived from the original on 5 April 2006. Retrieved 1 April 2006. Follett rewrote this book after two translators had failed to produce a publishable version of the original French work. He has tried to keep it from being published under his name and disowns it entirely, entreating readers not to buy it.
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