Simon Sebag Montefiore

Historian, Author

Born in 1965, Simon Sebag Montefiore is an historian. He has written a political column for The Sunday Times and contributes regularly to The Spectator and The New York Times. He has interviewed everyone from Margaret Thatcher to the Spice Girls.

Educated at Harrow and Cambridge, Simon’s PRINCE OF PRINCES: THE LIFE OF POTEMPKIN was published to universal critical acclaim in 2001 by Weidenfeld and Nicolson. It was published in America by St. Martin’s Press in 2002. In 1997, Orion published his second novel, MY AFFAIR WITH STALIN. A wickedly black comedy, set in a public school in the seventies, this is a highly original guide to first love, brutal dictatorship - and Josef Stalin. The book is currently being developed into a film.

His first novel, KING’S PARADE, was published in 1991 and described by the Times as 'brutal satire, something like a cross between Evelyn Waugh and Simon Raven'.

He spent the early Nineties travelling through the turbulent ex-Soviet Caucasus and Central Asia, where he was besieged with the Georgian President in his palace, forced to fight in a skirmish, and expelled from the Chechen capital, Grozny, accused of being a British spy. Since he has been appointed Special Correspondent of two former Eastern Block newspapers: the Georgian Times and Tallin City Paper in Estonia.

In 1996, he presented a Channel 4 documentary on his 2000 mile desert quest for slavery in Mauritania.

Weidenfeld & Nicolson published Simon’s STALIN: COURT OF THE RED TSAR in 2006.  YOUNG STALIN will be published in Spring 2007.  Simon’s forthcoming works are THE ROMANOVS and JERUSALEM.