Kenneth Martin Follett (born 5 June 1949) is a Welsh author of thrillers and historical novels who has sold nearly 200 million copies of his works.
Follett's commercial breakthrough came with the spy thriller Eye of the Needle (1978). After writing more best-sellers in the genre in the 1980s, he branched into historical fiction with The Pillars of the Earth (1989), an epic set in medieval England which became his best-known work and the first book in the Kingsbridge series. He has continued to write in both genres, including the Century Trilogy. Many of his books have achieved high ranking on bestseller lists, including the number-one position on the New York Times Best Seller list.
Kenneth Martin Follett was born in Cardiff, Wales, on 5 June 1949, into a pious family of modest means. He was the first child of Martin Follett, a tax inspector, and Lavinia (Veenie) Follett, who went on to have two more children, Hannah and James. Barred from watching films and television by his Plymouth Brethren parents, he developed an early interest in reading but remained an indifferent student until he entered his teens. His family moved to London when he was ten years old. He described how, once he read through the children’s section of the library, he was allowed to take out adult books and was inspired by Live and Let Die, saying it later inspired his first thrillers 10 years later.
He began applying himself to his studies at Harrow Weald Grammar School and Poole Technical College.
In 1967, he was admitted to University College London, where he studied philosophy and became active in centre-left politics. He married Mary in 1968, and their son, Emanuele, was born the same year. After graduating in 1970, he completed a three-month postgraduate journalism course and began working as a trainee reporter for the South Wales Echo in Cardiff. In 1973, his daughter, Marie-Claire, was born.
After three years in Cardiff, he returned to London as a general-assignment reporter for the Evening News. Finding the work unchallenging, he eventually left journalism for publishing and became, by the late 1970s, deputy managing director of the small London publisher Everest Books. He began writing fiction in his evenings and on weekends as a hobby. Later, he said, he began writing books when he needed £200 to fix his car, and the publishers' advance a fellow journalist had been paid for a thriller was £200.
Success came gradually at first, but the 1978 publication of Eye of the Needle, which became an international bestseller and sold more than 10 million copies, made him both wealthy and internationally famous.
Each of Follett's subsequent novels has become a best-seller, ranking high on the New York Times Best Seller list; a number have been adapted for the screen. As of January 2018, he had published 44 books. The first five best sellers were spy thrillers: Eye of the Needle (1978), Triple (1979), The Key to Rebecca (1980), The Man from St. Petersburg (1982) and Lie Down with Lions (1986). On Wings of Eagles (1983) was the true story of how two of Ross Perot's employees were rescued from Iran during the revolution of 1979.
The next three novels, Night Over Water (1991), A Dangerous Fortune (1993) and A Place Called Freedom (1995) were more historical than thriller, but he returned to the thriller genre with The Third Twin (1996) which in the Publishing Trends annual survey of international fiction best-sellers for 1997 was ranked no. 2 worldwide, after John Grisham's The Partner. His next work, The Hammer of Eden (1998), was another contemporary suspense story followed by a Cold War thriller, Code to Zero (2000).
Follett returned to the Second World War era with his next two novels, Jackdaws (2001), a thriller about a group of women parachuted into France to destroy a vital telephone exchange – which won the Corine Literature Prize for 2003 – and Hornet Flight (2002), about a daring young Danish couple who escape to Britain from occupied Denmark in a rebuilt Hornet Moth biplane with vital information about German radar. Whiteout (2004) is a contemporary thriller about the theft of a deadly virus from a research lab.
The five-volume series has been described as "as comprehensive an account of the building of a civilization – with its laws, structures, customs and beliefs – as you are likely to encounter anywhere in popular fiction".
The Pillars of the Earth (1989) was Follett's first non-spy thriller. The novel is about the building of a cathedral in a small English village during the Anarchy in the 12th century. The novel was highly successful, received positive reviews and was on The New York Times Best Seller list for eighteen weeks. It topped best-seller lists in Canada, Britain and Italy, and was on the German best-seller list for six years. As of 2017, it has sold 26 million copies. On 16 August 2017, a computer game adaptation by German developer and publisher Daedalic Entertainment was released.
World Without End (2007) is its much-later sequel, that returns to Kingsbridge 157 years later, and features the descendants of the characters in Pillars. It focuses on the destinies of a handful of people as their lives are devastated by the Black Death, the plague that swept Europe from the middle of the 14th century.
A Column of Fire (2017) begins in 1558 as the story follows the romance between Ned Willard and Margery Fitzgerald over half a century. It commences at a time when Europe turns against Elizabethan England, and the queen finds herself beset by plots to dethrone her.
The Evening and the Morning (2020) is a prequel to The Pillars of the Earth. Set in the decade around 1000 AD – in the so-called Dark Ages – the story "concerns the gradual creation of the town of Kingsbridge and of the many people – priests, nobles, peasants, the enslaved – who played significant roles". As such, the book provides "a solid underpinning to the later installments of the Kingsbridge series".
The Armour of Light (2023) is set in 1792, around the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. The book explores the societal upheaval following the invention of the Spinning Jenny in 1770. Set against the backdrop of Napoleonic wars and economic transformation, it follows interconnected characters: a widow coping with her husband’s death in a factory accident, a young woman funding a school for impoverished children, a man inheriting a failing business, and a wealthy industrialist protecting his fortune at all costs. Amid war and social change, the story examines the human cost of progress and the struggle to rebuild a fractured world.
Follett's novels Fall of Giants, Winter of the World and Edge of Eternity, make up the Century Trilogy. Fall of Giants (2010) followed the fates of five interrelated families – Welsh, American, German, Russian and English – as they moved through the world-shaking dramas of the First World War, the Russian Revolution and the struggle for women's suffrage. Fall of Giants, published simultaneously in 14 countries, was internationally popular and topped several best-seller lists.
Winter of the World (2012) picks up where the first book left off, as its five interrelated families enter a time of enormous social, political, and economic turmoil, beginning with the rise of Nazi Germany, through the Spanish Civil War and the great dramas of World War II, to the explosions of the American and Soviet atom bombs and the beginning of the long Cold War.