Guy Walters

Guy Walters
Guy Walters, November 2014
Born Guy Edward Barham Walters
(1971-08-08) 8 August 1971
Kensington, London, England.
Residence Wiltshire, England.
Alma mater Eton College
Westfield College, University of London
Newcastle University
Spouse(s) Annabel Venning
Children 4

Guy Edward Barham Walters (born 8 August 1963) is a British author, historian and journalist. He is known for his writing about the Second World War.

Early life and education

Walters was born in Kensington, London, on 8 August 1971.[1] He is a descendant of Richard Harris Barham and Edward Augustus Bond. He was educated at Cheam School, Eton College, Westfield College, University of London (now part of Queen Mary, University of London), and is studying for a PhD in history at Newcastle University. His thesis is on the postwar activities of Werner Naumann.

Career

From 1992 to 2000 he worked at The Times. His first book, The Traitor, was published in 2002, and concerns the British Free Corps, a British unit of the Waffen-SS. The Leader (2003) is set in a Britain ruled by Oswald Mosley as a Fascist dictator. The Occupation (2004) takes place during the German occupation of the Channel Islands. The Colditz Legacy (2005) is set in Colditz Castle during the war and the 1970s.

With James Owen, he edited The Voice of War in 2004, a collection of Second World War memoirs. In 2006 he published Berlin Games, a history of the 1936 Berlin Olympics, which was shortlisted for the 2006 William Hill Sports Book of the Year and the 2007 Outstanding Book of the Year by the North American Society for the Sociology of Sport.

In 2009, Walters published Hunting Evil, a history of how the Nazi war criminals escaped after the war, and how they were brought to justice.

"Frustrated at the enormous amount of junk history around, Guy sees it as his personal mission to wage war on ignorance and misconceptions about the past.".[2] He was scathing about the Hitler conspiracy book and film Grey Wolf describing it as "2,000 per cent rubbish" when the book was published. Walters added: "It's an absolute disgrace. There's no substance to it at all. It appeals to the deluded fantasies of conspiracy theorists and has no place whatsoever in historical research."[3]

Writing in the Daily Mail, Walters has raised questions regarding the veracity of Denis Avey's claims to have smuggled himself into Auschwitz[4] and about fraudulent Holocaust memoirs generally, and has questioned the level of acclaim given to Mary Seacole.

In June 2013, he was appointed to the position of lecturer in modern British history at the New College of the Humanities in London.

Personal life

Walters lives in Wiltshire with his wife Annabel Venning and their two children.[5]

Selected publications

Fiction

  • The Traitor (2002), ISBN 0-7553-0056-4
  • The Leader (2003), ISBN 0-7553-0057-2
  • The Occupation (2004), ISBN 0-7553-2064-6
  • The Colditz Legacy (2005), ISBN 0-7553-2715-2
  • Diary of a Hapless Househusband (2007) (as Sam Holden), ISBN 978-0-099-50936-3
  • Growing Pains of a Hapless Househusband (2008) (as Sam Holden), ISBN 978-0-09-951807-5

Non-fiction

  • The Voice of War: The Second World War Told by Those Who Fought It (2004), ISBN 0-670-91423-1 (ed. with James Owen)
  • Berlin Games: How Hitler Stole the Olympic Dream (2006), ISBN 0-7195-6783-1
  • Hunting Evil: The Nazi War Criminals who Escaped and the Dramatic Hunt to Bring Them to Justice (2009), ISBN 978-0-593-05991-3
  • The Real Great Escape (2013), ISBN 978-0-593-07190-8
  • Nazis, Spies & Fakes: Ten Years at the Coalface of History (2013)
  • Naumann's War: The Life of Werner Naumann from 1909 to 1945 (2016)

References

  1. ↑ "Results for England & Wales Births 1837-2006". Find My Past. Retrieved 2015-06-27.
  2. ↑ "Guy Walters – Telegraph Blogs". Blogs.telegraph.co.uk. Archived from the original on 7 October 2013. Retrieved 5 October 2013.
  3. ↑ Harding, Anna (25 January 2014). "New book claims THIS picture proves Hitler escaped his Berlin bunker and died in South America in 1984 aged 95". Mail Online. London: The Daily Mail. Retrieved 28 May 2014.
  4. ↑ "The curious case of the "break into Auschwitz"". Newstatesman.com. Retrieved 2013-10-05.
  5. ↑ "Guy Walters from HarperCollins Publishers". Harpercollins. Retrieved 8 June 2018.

This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.