Colin Thubron (born 1939) is an English novelist and travel writer whose career has ranged across more than half a century. He first established his reputation with books on the Middle East, including Mirror to Damascus, The Hills of Adonis and Jerusalem, before undertaking increasingly ambitious journeys through Russia, China, Central Asia, Siberia and along the Silk Road. His travel writing combines close observation of landscape and people with a strong interest in the histories, religions and political changes that have shaped the places through which he travels. Alongside this work he has maintained a parallel career as a novelist, producing psychologically intense fiction such as A Cruel Madness, Falling, Distance, To the Last City and Night of Fire. He has served as President of the Royal Society of Literature and was appointed CBE for services to literature.
Among Thubron's fiction, Emperor is his most explicitly historical novel. Set in AD 312, it follows Constantine as he leads his army across the Alps and into Italy during his campaign against Maxentius, culminating in the events that precede his seizure of Rome and his conversion to Christianity. Thubron constructs the story through a mosaic of journals, letters and other imagined documents written by Constantine and those around him, including his wife Fausta, his secretary and a Christian bishop. The result combines political and military history with a close psychological portrait of an ambitious ruler confronting questions of faith, loyalty and power. Thubron's extensive experience of writing about ancient cultures and historic landscapes gives the novel a particularly strong sense of place and of the Roman world in a period of profound religious and political transformation.
