Winston Graham

Winston Graham was born in Manchester in 1908 and moved with his family to Perranporth in Cornwall when he was seventeen. The region’s mining communities, coast and changing social structure became the central imaginative landscape of his career. Graham began writing when young and published his first novel in the 1930s, eventually becoming a prolific full-time author of historical fiction, thrillers, crime novels and plays.

His best-known achievement is the twelve-volume Poldark saga, beginning with Ross Poldark in 1945 and concluding with Bella Poldark in 2002. The series follows several families from the 1780s into the nineteenth century, using copper mining, banking, smuggling, elections, war and social mobility to show Cornwall’s place within wider British change. Graham also wrote Marnie, later adapted for film by Alfred Hitchcock, and numerous standalone novels. His historical fiction combines romantic and domestic conflict with sustained economic detail, particularly the vulnerability of communities dependent on mines and credit. Graham died in 2003, leaving one of the longest and most fully developed regional sagas in British historical fiction.