Simon Tolkien

I live in Santa Barbara, California where the sky really is as blue as the deep blue sea most days, and I love the roar of the ocean, the majestic mountains, the white Spanish adobe architecture, and the twisting oaks and carpets of flowers in my yard where I walk with my beloved pug, Sadie, twice a day. It’s a long way from the sleepy Oxfordshire village where I grew up and the Catholic boarding school where I spent my teenage years.

I studied modern history at Trinity College, Oxford and then reluctantly went to law school. I thought that I was putting my life in a straitjacket, but criminal law was a revelation. In the London prisons and police stations I met people from every walk of life, and I became a barrister because I wanted to represent them in court, rather than just prepare their cases for trial. I loved the drama and responsibility of the work, but then at the age of forty-one, I decided to reinvent myself as a novelist, even though I had never written a word of fiction before! I am the grandson of J.R.R. Tolkien and I think that his immense literary achievements had inhibited me up to then. I started with what I knew and wrote courtroom dramas, and then this developed into crime thrillers with historical settings, and finally character-driven historical fiction. I loved history as a child and my novels have enabled me to recapture the sense of wonder I felt about the past as being another country just as real as our own. My focus has been on the turbulent first fifty years of the 20th century and my settings have included the London Blitz, the Battle of the Somme, and now, in my forthcoming duology, New York in the Great Depression and the Spanish Civil War.

I have been so lucky to have been married for forty years to my wife, Tracy who has encouraged me in all my creative endeavors. She is a writer herself and an expert on vintage fashion and jewelry, and we have two wonderful children, Nicholas and Anna.