Edward Rutherfurd is a pen name for Francis Edward Wintle[1] (born in 1948). He is best known as a writer of epic historical novels that span long periods of history but are set in particular places. His debut novel, Sarum, set the pattern for his work with a ten-thousand-year storyline.
Biography
Rutherfurd attended the University of Cambridge and Stanford Business School, where he earned a Sloan fellowship.[1][2] After graduating he worked in political research, bookselling and publishing.[2] He abandoned his career in the book trade in 1983 and returned to his childhood home to write Sarum, a historical novel with a ten-thousand year story, set in the area around the ancient monument of Stonehenge and Salisbury.[3]
His books have sold more than fifteen million copies and been translated into twenty languages.[4] Rutherfurd settled near Dublin, Ireland in the early 1990s, but currently divides his time between Europe and North America.[2]
New York: The Novel, won the Langum Prize for American Historical Fiction in 2009[5] and was awarded the Washington Irving Medal for Literary Excellence, by the Saint Nicholas Society of the City of New York, in 2011.[6]
In 2015 Edward Rutherfurd was the recipient of the City of Zaragoza's International Historical Novel Honor Award "for his body of work in the field of the historical novel."[7]
Style
Rutherfurd invents four to six fictional families and tells the stories of their descendants. Using this framework, he chronicles the history of a place, often from the beginning of civilisation to modern times – a kind of historical fiction inspired by the work of James Michener.[8]
Rutherfurd's novels are generally at least 500 pages in length and sometimes more than 1,000. Divided into a number of parts, each chapter represents a different era in the place where the novel is set. There is usually an extensive family tree in the introduction, with each generational line matching the corresponding chapters.[9][10]
Works
Edward Rutherfurd talks about New York novel on Bookbits radio.
Sarum (1987) latterly titled Sarum: the Novel of England
Russka (1991) sometimes titled Russka: the Novel of Russia
