John Boyne

John Boyne is an Irish novelist born in Dublin in 1971. He studied English literature at Trinity College Dublin and creative writing at the University of East Anglia before publishing his first novel, The Thief of Time, in 2000. His work ranges across historical, literary and contemporary fiction for adults and younger readers. Boyne has received four Irish Book Awards and numerous international honours, while his books have been translated into sixty languages. The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, his best-known novel, has sold more than eleven million copies and has been adapted for film, theatre, opera and ballet.

Boyne’s historical novels cover a wide chronological range. Crippen reconstructs the notorious Edwardian murder case; Mutiny on the Bounty retells the eighteenth-century maritime rebellion; and The House of Special Purpose follows a character connected with the Romanov family and the Russian Revolution. The Absolutist examines friendship, sexuality and accusations of cowardice during the First World War, while The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, The Boy at the Top of the Mountain and All the Broken Places address Nazi Germany, the Holocaust and their aftermath. Other historically grounded works include Stay Where You Are and Then Leave, set during the First World War, and A Traveller at the Gates of Wisdom, which follows related lives across two thousand years of human history. Boyne should therefore be classified as a literary novelist with a substantial body of historical fiction, rather than exclusively as a historical novelist.