Simon Sebag Montefiore

Simon Sebag Montefiore is a British historian and novelist best known for large-scale narrative histories of Russia, monarchy, political power and the great dynasties of world history. He holds a PhD from Cambridge and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. His major works of non-fiction include Catherine the Great & Potemkin, Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, Young Stalin, Jerusalem: The Biography and The Romanovs: 1613–1918. His more recent The World: A Family History of Humanity takes a much broader approach, telling global history through families and dynasties ranging from the Caesars, Ottomans and Mughals to the Habsburgs, Bonapartes, Kennedys and modern ruling families. His books have been translated into more than forty languages and have won awards for both history and biography.

Montefiore has also written historical fiction, most notably the Moscow Trilogy, which explores twentieth-century Russia through fictional characters caught up in revolution, Stalinism and war. Sashenka begins in imperial Russia before the 1917 Revolution and follows its heroine into the dangerous world of Stalin’s Soviet Union. One Night in Winter is set in Moscow at the end of the Second World War, when a group of privileged teenagers becomes entangled in a lethal investigation by Stalin’s secret police, while Red Sky at Noon follows a political prisoner who joins a Soviet penal cavalry unit during the desperate fighting against Nazi Germany in 1942. Although the novels are fictional, Montefiore draws heavily on his knowledge of Stalinist Russia and places invented characters alongside the political institutions, fears and upheavals of the period.