The Prime Minister's Affair

Born Sheffield in 62, brought up in Lincolnshire, after studying English at Oxford I worked for ten years as a senior current affairs producer with the BBC, covering the big international stories of the day. My programme on the massacre at Srebrenica in 1995 was shortlisted for an Emmy and used in evidence at the United Nations War Crimes Tribunal at the Hague. For the next ten years, I wrote and directed historical documentaries for the BBC and international co-producers, including an award winning series, ‘The Battle of the Atlantic’, and I wrote a couple of bestselling accounts of Second World War campaigns, ‘The Battle of the Atlantic’, and ‘D-Day to Berlin’, to accompany TV productions of the same name. My first novel, The Interrogator, was shortlisted for the Ian Fleming Thriller of the Year Award and the Ellis Peters Historical Fiction Award, and it was The Daily Mail’s debut thriller of 2009. The second, To Kill A Tsar, was one of The Mail’s thrillers of 2010 and was shortlisted for The Scott Prize for Historical Fiction and the Ellis Peters Award. My 1960’s espionage thriller, Witchfinder, was one of The Times Literary Supplement Books of the Year.  The Daily Mail was decent enough to describe me as ‘as one of Britain’s most accomplished thriller writers’, and The Times Literary Supplement noted that ‘if le Carré needs a successor, Williams has all the equipment for the role.’ Very gratifying. But as you can imagine from the above, getting the history right is especially important to me: history thrillers are my thing!