Background

Ken Follett was born on June 5, 1949, in Cardiff, Wales, United Kingdom. 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.

Education

After Follet's family moved to London when he was ten years old, he attended Harrow Weald Grammar School and then Poole Technical College. He won admission in 1967 to University College London, where he studied philosophy, and from which he graduated in 1970.

Career

In September 1970, just out of university, Ken got a place on the graduate journalism course run by Thompson Regional Newspapers. After three months of training, students were sent on work placements with Thompson-owned newspapers. With his knowledge of Cardiff, Ken returned to his native Wales to join the South Wales Echo as a trainee reporter. Throughout his career as a journalist, Ken worked as a general reporter, or "fireman", covering whatever stories came up on the day. On the South Wales Echo, he got the most pleasure out of pop music writing, interviewing stars like Led Zeppelin and Stevie Wonder.

He returned to London in 1973 to work on the Evening News, where he wrote a regular column about the River Thames. He enjoyed the work but did not find it very stimulating. “I wanted to be a hotshot investigative reporter, but I never made the grade.”

Ken became increasingly frustrated with his job at the Evening News and began to write. At first, this was only in the evenings and at weekends. But even when he began to make money from his writing, he did not give up his day job for several years. He saw his writing as, ‘sort of a paying hobby’. Most of what he wrote during that period was published, but despite his desire to write a best-seller, none of those early books sold very well.

During the 1970s, Ken met Al Zuckerman, who was to have a profound effect on the young writer’s aspirations as a writer of popular fiction. Seeing some of Ken’s early work, Al became his American agent. Ken would send him outlines and manuscripts and suggest ideas. Al would write back, usually to say that the story was not sellable to the American market.

Before anyone else had even read it, Ken realized that Eye of the Needle was much better than anything he had done before. He remembers sitting at the typewriter and saying to his wife, Mary, “this is absolutely terrific!”. Al Zuckerman, who had for years been telling Ken why his books would never sell in America, told him, “this is going to be a huge international bestseller, and you are going to have tax problems”.

Al sold the book to a small American publisher who also saw that it was going to be a big bestseller. Ironically, the British publisher who had actually commissioned it did not see it that way. Although he was pleased with the book, he didn’t see it as a bestseller and planned to publish it as a ‘paperback original’, a genre adventure that came out straight away as a paperback.

By this time, Ken had left newspapers and was working for a small London publisher, Everest Books, where he had risen to be Deputy Managing Director. He was earning £8 000 a year. Confident that Eye of the Needle would make him more than £16 000, Ken decided that the book would keep him and his family alive for a couple of years, and left his job.

“I didn’t envisage that it would sell ten million copies, but I knew it was good enough to keep us alive. I surmised that it was the moment to quit my salaried job and try and make it as a full-time writer.”

It began well. On his first day in his new career, an agent in Scandinavia sold the Norwegian rights to one of his children’s books for £400. Shortly after that, Eye of the Needle was sold to an American publisher for an advance of $20,000. The American hardcover publisher then auctioned the paperback rights among the American paperback publishing houses.

“One day I got a phone call from my agent saying, ‘they are auctioning the paperback rights of your book today and the price has reached half-a-million dollars, but the auction is still going on. "I figured out that my share of that half-million dollars was about £150 000 and since I was reckoning that I could live on £8 000 a year, this would probably keep me going for the rest of my life. So that was a pretty big day.”

The auction finished at about $800 000. Ken knew that if a publisher had laid out that much money in advance on a book, they would print a lot of copies and promote the book strongly. The book’s sales proved him right, but he did not rest on his laurels.

“Although I had made all this money with Eye of the Needle, I was very worried that I might not be able to do it again. It happens to quite a lot of writers. They write one terrific book and then the next one is not so good and doesn’t sell quite so well, the third one is not very good and they never write a fourth. I was very conscious that that might easily happen to me, and so I worked very hard on Triple, which was my next book, to try to make it as exciting as Eye of the Needle.”

Thanks to the success of Eye of the Needle, Ken and his wife Mary realized that they could live anywhere they wanted. They chose the South of France, which they had always had their eye on. They thought it would be good for their children to learn French and broaden their minds. In 1979, they rented a villa near Grasse, a town near Nice, and lived there for three years.

After three years in France, Ken and Mary returned to England and bought a house in Surrey. In 1982, while doing work for the Labour Party, Ken met Barbara Broer, who was then the local branch secretary. Ken and Barbara became friends and started to work together.

He went on to write four more best-selling thrillers: Triple, The Key to Rebecca, The Man from St Petersburg and Lie Down with Lions. Cliff Robertson and David Soul starred in the miniseries of The Key to Rebecca. In 1994, Timothy Dalton, Omar Sharif, and Marg Helgenberger starred in the miniseries of Lie Down with Lions.

Ken Follett also wrote On Wings of Eagles, the true story of how two employees of Ross Perot were rescued from Iran during the revolution of 1979. It was made into a miniseries with Richard Crenna as Ross Perot and Burt Lancaster as Colonel "Bull" Simons.

Follett then surprised readers by radically changing course with The Pillars of the Earth, a novel about the building of a cathedral during the Middle Ages. Published to rave reviews in September 1989, it was on the New York Times best-seller list for 18 weeks. It also reached the number one position on lists in Canada, Great Britain, and Italy, and was on the German best-seller list for an amazing six years. Pillars, in fact, was voted the third-greatest book ever written by some 250,000 viewers of the German television station ZDF in 2004, beaten only by The Lord of the Rings and the Bible. A similar poll conducted by the BBC ranked it 33 on a list of the 100 greatest novels.

For a while, Ken Follett abandoned the spy genre, but his stories still had a powerful narrative drive, strong women, suspense and intrigue. He followed Pillars with Night over Water, A Dangerous Fortune and A Place Called Freedom.

Follett returned to the thriller with The Third Twin, a scorching suspense novel about a young woman scientist who stumbles across a secret genetic-engineering experiment. Miniseries rights were sold to CBS for $1,400,000, a record for four hours of television. It starred Kelly McGillis and Larry Hagman and was broadcast in November 1997. (Ken Follett appeared briefly as the butler.) In Publishing Trends' annual survey of international fiction bestsellers for 1997, The Third Twin was ranked number two in the world, beaten only by John Grisham's The Partner.

The Hammer of Eden, another nail-biting contemporary suspense story, came in 1998. Code to Zero (2000), about brainwashing and rocket science in the 50s, went to number one on best-seller lists in the United States, German and Italy, with film rights snapped up by Gladiator producer Doug Wick in a seven-figure deal. Jackdaws (2001), a World War II spy thriller in the tradition of Eye of the Needle, won the Corine Prize for 2003, film rights were sold to Dino De Laurentiis. Hornet Flight, published in December 2002, about two young people who escape German-occupied Denmark in a Hornet Moth biplane, is loosely based on a true story. White Out, a contemporary thriller about the theft of a dangerous virus from a laboratory, was published in 2004.

Besides writing, Follett served as chair of the National Year of Reading in 1998–1999, an initiative by the British government to raise literacy levels. He is president of the Dyslexia Institute, chair of the advisory committee of Reading Is Fundamental (United Kingdom), a trustee of the National Literacy Trust, a member of the Welsh Academy, a board director of the National Academy of Writing, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. He is active in numerous Stevenage charities and is a governor of Roebuck Primary School.

Achievements

• 

  Ken Follett is one of the world's most popular novelists. He has sold approximately 90 million books. His World Without End, the long-awaited sequel to The Pillars of the Earth, was published in October 2007. It is set in Kingsbridge, the fictional location of the cathedral in Pillars, at the time of the Black Death, and features the descendants of the original characters.
  
  In 2010 Follett was made a Grand Master at Thrillerfest V in New York. He received Honorary Doctor of Literature degrees from the following universities: the University of Glamorgan (now the University of South Wales) in 2007, Saginaw Valley State University in 2007, the University of Exeter in 2008, and the University of Hertfordshire in 2018.
  
  Ken has been active in numerous literacy charities and was the president of Dyslexia Action for 10 years. He was the chair of the National Year of Reading, a joint initiative between government and businesses. He is also active in many Stevenage charities and is the president of the Stevenage Community Trust. Ken also set up The Follett Trust, which awards single donations to the arts and in cases of social deprivation and education.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Modigliani Scandal

    (A fabulous "lost masterpiece" becomes the ultimate prize ...)

    1976
  • Notre-Dame

    (In this short, spellbinding book, international bestselli...)

    2019
  • Triple

    (As Egypt comes closer and closer to developing a nuclear ...)

    1979
  • Night over Water

    (Set in the early days of World War II, Night over Water c...)

    1991
  • Jackdaws

    (A senior agent in the ranks of the Special Operations Exe...)

    2001
  • Edge of Eternity

    (East German teacher Rebecca Hoffmann discovers she’s been...)

    2014
  • The Pillars of the Earth

    (The Pillars of the Earth tells the story of Philip, prior...)

    1989
  • Winter of the World

    (Carla von Ulrich, born of German and English parents, fin...)

    2012
  • Winter of the World

    (Carla von Ulrich, born of German and English parents, fin...)

    2012
  • World Without End

    (The cathedral and the priory are again at the center of a...)

    2007
  • On Wings of Eagles

    (When two of his employees were held hostage in a heavily ...)

    1983
  • Third Twin

    (Using a restricted FBI database, genetic researcher Jeani...)

    1996
  • Paper Money

    (In one suspenseful, action-packed day, fortunes change ha...)

    1977
  • A Dangerous Fortune

    (In 1866, tragedy strikes the exclusive Windfield School w...)

    1993
  • A Column of Fire

    (In 1558, the ancient stones of Kingsbridge Cathedral look...)

    2017
  • Code to Zero

    (January, 1958 - the darkest hour of the Cold War and the ...)

    2000
  • Lie Down with Lions

    (They were two men on opposite sides of the Cold War, with...)

    1985
  • Fall of Giants

    (A thirteen-year-old Welsh boy enters a man’s world in the...)

    2010
  • The Key to Rebecca

    (A brilliant and ruthless Nazi master agent is on the loos...)

    1980
  • Hornet Flight

    (It's June 1941, and the low point of the war. England thr...)

    2002
  • The Hammer of Eden

    (The Governor wants the problem to disappear. But agent Ju...)

    1998
  • Whiteout

    (A missing canister of a deadly virus. A lab technician bl...)

    2004
  • The Man from St. Petersburg

    (His name was Feliks. He came to London to commit a murder...)

    1982
  • Place Called Freedom

    (Scotland, 1766. Sentenced to a life of misery in the brut...)

    1995

Religion

Follett grew up in a religious family, where his parents were devout born-again Christians. However, he stated that during his student years he became increasingly skeptical about the religion in which he had been brought up: "By the time I applied to college, I had grave doubts about my parents’ religion. I had arguments with my father about theology. Philosophy is, in part, a study of what is a good argument and what is not; what is evidence and what is fake evidence. So, my interest in philosophy stemmed from the agonizing conflict I had over whether or not I believed in my parents’ religion. In the end, I completely rejected it. I’m not a religious person. I’m an atheist. I ended up being the absolute opposite of my parents. It was a process that took some years, and studying philosophy was part of that process."

Politics

During his student years at University College London, Follett began to develop an interest in politics: “Politics was discussed all the time. It seemed as if student protest was a world-wide movement – it was going on in the States and in Paris and Berlin. Although we were young and had the arrogance of youth, nevertheless when you look at the issues that we fought over, I think by and large we were right.” At this time, Ken was not attracted by the formal politics of the British Labour movement. Like his fellow protesters, he saw it as far too right-wing.

After the graduation Ken continued his political interests, joining the National Union of Journalists, and the same Labour Party that he had rejected during his student years. Ken was regularly enlisted by the Party to phone up his well-known friends and ask them to show their support for the Labour party. In 1990, he traveled to Washington DC with several senior Labour officials, including Jack Cunningham, then campaign manager and Peter Mandelson, then Director of Communications.

Follett himself remains a prominent Labour supporter and fundraiser as well as a prominent Blairite. In 2010, he was the largest donor to Ed Balls's campaign to become a leader of the Labour Party. Despite these successes, Ken no longer gets involved in fundraising or celebrity-gathering: “After a while, your friends get fed up with you phoning them and asking for money, or asking them to show up for a photocall. You have a certain amount of credit with your friends and after a few years you use that up, and it’s time to let somebody else do the fundraising and the phoning.”

Views

When it comes down to writing, Ken is becoming a perfectionist and take increasing lengths to write each book. He began to plan thoroughly in advance, doing detailed research, and writing and developing an outline. It now takes him around two years to write each one. Follett once said about his style of writing: "I’m not that kind of writer. The important thing in my books is the story. I want the reader to see the story. When you’re reading one of my books, I don’t want you thinking about a sentence or marveling at a vivid image. Or, exclaiming, "What a clever alliteration." I don’t want you thinking about my prose. I want you to focus on the story. To illustrate that, I’ve said, "My style is like a window. You look through it and see the story. You don’t pay attention to the pane of glass."

Unlike many of his contemporaries, Follett positively relishes the label "popular writer." He once commented in Dictionary of Literary Biography: "I'm not under the illusion that the world is waiting for my thoughts to appear in print. People want to be told a story, and that's what I'm up to. I think of myself as a craftsman more than an artist."

Quotations: “There is a remote connection between philosophy and fiction. When you study philosophy you deal with questions like: ‘Here we are sitting at a table, but is the table real?’ Now that’s a daft question because of course, the table is real. When you study philosophy, however, you need to take that sort of thing seriously and you have to have an off-the-wall imagination. It’s the same with fiction which is all about imagining situations that are different from the real world.”

“All my life I have got tremendous pleasure out of good storytelling, good yarns that have taken me to places I have never been and shown me lifestyles and periods that I have never known. When I started writing fiction, my impulse was to give the same pleasure to others that I had enjoyed myself.”

“My writing always takes priority over anything I do politically. That is the most important thing in my working life and I would never let my political activities get in the way of my work in any way.”

"My aim in constructing sentences is to make the sentence utterly easy to understand, writing what I call transparent prose. I’ve failed dreadfully if you have to read a sentence twice to figure out what I meant. I don’t feel that all writers should have my approach. There are many writers who write complicated, rather elaborate sentences which are actually a lot of fun. They might be comedy writers – P. G. Wodehouse, for example, does this all the time. With Wodehouse, what you are enjoying is the daft but entertaining way in which he phrases things. For instance, he says that Lord Emsworth wasn’t exactly disgruntled but he was very far from being gruntled. At another end of the spectrum, with Dickens, what you are enjoying is the richness of his writing and the way his sentences can go on and on."

"During the elaboration process, I get a lot of my ideas from research. In the case of Victorian bankers, I read books about how Victorian bankers failed, how they succeeded, what their houses were like, the domestic problems that they might have had, whether they got divorced, how they did their courting when they fell in love, and so on. And all those research topics give you ideas for dramatic scenes."

"When you are writing the outline you can do anything from changing the gender of a character to reseting the whole thing in Egypt. You are all-powerful. After you have made those decisions, you come to the stage where each sentence in our outline has to be turned into four or five pages of prose. This is where the real imaginative work comes in. You have to take your ideas and you have to walk people in and out of the room, you have to describe the room and the clothes they are wearing and you have to make the reader share their anxieties, hopes, triumphs and their romantic feelings."

"What you have to remember about the publishing business is that a young editor or small publisher makes a fortune by finding an unknown writer and making the book into a best seller. That is how you get on in the publishing business. And so if you do write something good, they will be crazy about it and they’ll publish it with great enthusiasm. They will also spend money on advertising it."

"You have to ask yourself questions all the time about these people that you have created and the problems they are confronted with. You ask about how clever they are, how courageous and you must always ask, in every situation they confront, what are they afraid of? I then see that any little changes have consequences later in the story and I have to change the story to adjust it."

"I enjoyed writing historical novels but didn’t want to write another medieval story. I realized the twentieth century is the most dramatic period in our history. We had the First World War which was the most terrible one the human race had ever experienced. Then, came World War II, which was worse. And ultimately, we had the Cold War, which if it turned into a hot war, would probably have wiped out the entire human race. There basically, is the terrible drama of the twentieth century. But it’s also our story - mine and yours. We were born in the twentieth century; and its history is the story of what we, our parents, and grandparents experienced. It’s very immediate for us. So, I decided to write a historical novel about the twentieth century."

Membership

Ken Follett is a Fellow of The Royal Society of Literature and a member of the Royal Society of Arts. He is also a member of the National Academy of Writing (2003) and the Welsh Academy (2011).

• 

  Royal Society of Literature , United Kingdom

Personality

From a very early age, Ken was creating imaginary worlds for himself: “My mother told me stories all the time. I don’t know whether I inherited it from her or just acquired it under her influence, but by the time I was seven years old I was an imaginative child.” Ken was also reading from a very young age. Since his parents would not allow their children to watch television or go to the cinema, Ken found his escape in books. In particular, Enid Blyton (1897 – 1968), prolific author of the "Five Find-outers" mystery series and the "Famous Five" and "Secret Seven" adventure series, inspired him.

Later, at school, Ken was bored and badly behaved until the age of 13, but he admits that, “when I got interested in girls, school suddenly became much more fun”. Around the same time, he began to study seriously, and by revising harder than any of his classmates, he started to come top of the class and continued to do well into university.

Today Ken starts work after breakfast and writes until about 4 o’clock. When he feels that he has done a good day’s work, he allows himself to pursue other interests like politics and music. “I am a morning person. As soon as I’m up, I want to get to my desk. In the evening I want to relax and eat and drink and do all that sort of low tension stuff.”

Music has always been an interest for Ken. Both his parents played the piano, and his father even considered playing professionally. Ken plays bass guitar in a blues band, called "Damn Right I Got The Blues", and in ClogIron, whose first album, Top Lads All, was recorded in 2001 at Sunnybank Studios, Ripponden, West Yorkshire.

But Ken makes no false claims about his talents: “I’ve always played the guitar quite badly. I think it’s quite important to have something that you do badly, especially if you are the overachiever type of personality. Playing in a band is very sensory and writing is completely cerebral. My books are closely plotted, like all popular fiction, so I am always thinking about the mechanics of the story. Playing in a band is completely sensory. There’s a connection from the ears to the fingertips that does not pass through the conscious brain.”

He is also no stranger to the good life. “The world is full of good things to eat and drink. I am very fond of wine, I love champagne and I am very comfortable in restaurants. I always think of what Dudley Moore said in the film Arthur, ‘waiters are wonderful people’. You ask them for something and they bring it. Same principle as Santa Claus. It’s one of the nicest things in the world to sit there sipping wine and talking to friends and have people bring you plates of food.’”

Follett has always been fascinated by cathedrals: "It was mainly my interest in the Middle Ages, and in particular, the building of the cathedrals. Most people who stand before a medieval cathedral wonder why it’s here. They ask themselves, ‘Why did medieval people want one of these so badly that they went to the enormous trouble and expense of building it? What compelled them to do this?’ That question is really the driving force of Pillars of the Earth. The novel is my answer to that question, and it helps shed light on the importance of these magnificent cathedrals."

Also, Ken Follett is a lover of Shakespeare and is often seen attending the Globe Theatre in London.

Physical Characteristics: Eye color: Blue

Hair color: Grey

Height: Feet: 5'11'' (180 cm)

Weight: 196 pounds (80 kg)

Chest size: 40 inches

Quotes from others about the person

• "Follett is masterly in conveying so much drama and historical information so vividly. He puts to good use the professional skills he has honed over the years - giving his characters a conversational style neither pseudo-quaint nor jarringly contemporary. That works well. And for all his belief in the redemptive quality of liberal humanism, he makes sure not to endow his characters with excessively modern sensibilities. As for the occasional cliche - well, unless you're Tolstoy, you're not going to have the time or the ability to be original throughout your 1,000-page blockbuster. Ken Follett is no Tolstoy, but he is a tireless storyteller, and although his tale has flaws, it's grippingly told, and readable to the end." - Roger Boylan, New York Times
  
  "Follett's greatest virtue as a novelist that he has been able to bring forward a writing style he perfected in his earlier thrillers... Essentially, he's writing several interrelated books at once, without ever losing the inevitable forward impulse. And while it sounds bizarre to consider a book this huge a "page-turner," that's exactly what Fall of Giants is." - The Seattle Times

Interests

• music, traveling, wine, reading, theather, acting, history of Middle Ages

• Politicians

  Edward Michael Balls

• Writers

  Enid Blyton, Shakespeare, Stephen King, Richard North Patterson, Lee Child, Jane Austen

• Sport & Clubs

  golf

• Music & Bands

  blues, Damn Right I Got the Blues, folk group Clog Iron

Connections

While studying for his "A" level school exams, Ken had met a young woman called Mary. They had fallen for each other and were still dating when Ken went up to university. They married at the end of his first term and Ken’s son Emanuele was born in July 1968. In 1973, Ken and Mary had a daughter, Marie-Claire.

In 1982, while doing work for the Labour Party, Ken met Barbara Broer, who was then the local branch secretary. Soon, they fell in love and left Farnham together for London. They married in 1984.

Father:

Martin D. Follett

Mother:

Lavinia C. (Evans) Follett

ex wife:

Mary Emma Ruth Elson

1968–1985

Wife:

Daphne Barbara Follett

Daphne Barbara Follett (née Hubbard; born 25 December 1942) is a British Labour Party politician who served as the Member of Parliament (MP) for Stevenage from 1997 until 2010. During this time she held several parliamentary and ministerial positions. In the decade before entering Parliament she played a major part in transformation of the Labour Party, firstly by making members more aware of their visual impact on voters and secondly by co-founding and running two organizations, Labour Women's Network and Emily's List UK, which spearheaded reforms that helped Labour to return a record 101 women to Parliament in 1997. Following the United Kingdom Parliamentary expenses scandal, she repaid more than £32,000 which she had claimed in expenses.

Daughter:

Marie-Claire Follett

Son:

Emanuele Follett

stepson:

Adam Broer

stepdaughter:

Kim Turner

stepdaughter:

Jann Turner

born 1964

Friend:

Edward Victor

9 September 1939 – 7 June 2017

References

• Ken Follett's Official Website