Background
Frederick Forsyth was born in August 1938 in Ashford, Kent, England.
Frederick Forsyth speaks fluent French, German and Spanish, and has travelled widely in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and these experiencies can be seen in the authenticity of his books.
Education
Tonbridge School
Granada University, Spain
Career
He started work as one of the youngest pilots in the RAF at the age of 19, serving from 1956 to 1958. For the next three and a half years he worked as a reporter for the Eastern Daily Press in Norfolk, before becoming a correspondant for Reuters in 1961, first in Paris, at the age of twenty-three, and then in East Germany and Czechoslovakia, locations which provided him with information for his first books. Returning to London in 1965, he worked as a radio and television reporter for the BBC. As assistant diplomatic correspondent, he covered the Biafran side of the Biafra-Nigeria war from July to September 1967, and this provided him with knowledge of international politics, and the world of mercenary soldiors. It was this work and related research that interested him with historical truth. In 1968 he left the BBC to return to Biafra, and he reported on the war, first as a freelance and later for the Daily Express and Time magazine.
In 1970, after nine years of an intense journalistic career, he decided to write a book using the research methods he had learnt while a reporter.
Politics
Forsyth is a Eurosceptic Conservative. He is Patron of Better Off Out, an organisation calling for Britain's withdrawal from the European Union. In 2003, he was awarded the One of Us Award from the Conservative Way Forward group for his services to the Conservative movement in Britain. He is also a patron of the Young Britons' Foundation. In 2005, he came out in opposition to Kenneth Clarke's candidacy for the leadership of the Conservative Party, calling Clarke's record in government "unrivalled; a record of failure which at every level has never been matched". Instead, he endorsed and donated money to David Davis's campaign.
He is a strong supporter of the British monarchy. In his book Icon, he recommended a constitutional monarchy as a solution to Russia's political problems following the collapse of the Soviet Union.