A. N. Wilson

Andrew Norman Wilson (1950) is a British writer and newspaper columnist. He has contributed to the Times Literary Supplement, the Observer and the Evening Standard and he his currently a columnist for the Daily Mail. Wilson is known for his critical biographies. He has written about writers – including Walter Scott, John Milton, Iris Murdoch, Dante Alighieri, Leo Tolstoy – but also historical figures like Jesus Christ, Paul the Apostle, Hitler and Queen Victoria, whose biography Victoria: A Life (2014) he will present at the festival. Apart from biographies, A. N. Wilson has also attracted attention with his views on religion; in the late 1980s he publicly declared himself an atheist and published several books critical of Christianity, such as God’s Funeral: The Decline of Faith in Western Civilization (1999). However, in the late 2000, Wilson declared his rediscovery of faith. His talent for social observation and satirical mind are also evident in his fiction – several of his novels feature political corruption or the tabloid press, but also more sensitive issues like paedophilia etc. His best known novel Winnie and Wolf (2007), however, is about the interwar friendship between Winifred Wagner, the organiser of the Bayreuth Music Festival, and Adolf Hitler.