Simon Mawer is a highly acclaimed British author, best known for his thriller, literature, and fiction books. He was born in England in 1948 and spent his childhood days in Malta and Cyprus due to his father's career in the Royal Navy.
Mawer was educated at Millfield School in Somerset and later at Brasenose College, Oxford, where he pursued a degree in biology. After graduation, he worked as a biology teacher for many years. His passion for biology is reflected in some of his works, such as his debut novel, Chimera, published in 1989, which won the McKitterick Prize for first novels.
Throughout his career, Mawer has written numerous novels, including Mendel's Dwarf, The Gospel of Judas, The Fall, and Swimming to Ithaca. His novel, Mendel's Dwarf, reached the last ten of the Booker Prize and was a New York Times "Book to Remember" for 1998. In 2009, his novel The Glass Room was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. His 2012 book, The Girl Who Fell From The Sky, and its sequel Tightrope, both feature the female Special Operations Executive agent Marian Sutro. Tightrope won the 2016 Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction.
In 2018, Mawer published Prague Spring, a novel that marked his return to a Czech setting, following both Mendel's Dwarf and The Glass Room. His latest novel, ANCESTRY, which explores fiction and personal history, was published in both the UK and the US in 2022. He is married and has two children and four grandchildren. Mawer and his wife have lived in Italy for over forty years but now split their time between their home near Rome and a house in England.