The Historian of War Sir Antony Beevor was educated at Winchester and Sandhurst, where he studied under John Keegan. A regular officer with the 11th Hussars, he left the Army after five years to write. He has published four novels, and thirteen books of non-fiction. His work has appeared in thirty-seven foreign editions and sold more than nine million copies.
His books include Inside the British Army (1990); Crete — The Battle and the Resistance, (1991) which was awarded a Runciman Prize, and Paris After the Liberation, 1944-1949 (written with his wife Artemis Cooper and published in 1994). Stalingrad, published in 1998, won the first Samuel Johnson Prize, the Wolfson Prize for History and the Hawthornden Prize for Literature in 1999. Berlin – The Downfall 1945, published in 2002, was accompanied by a BBC Timewatch programme on his research into the subject. It was a No. 1 Bestseller in seven countries apart from Britain, and in the top five in another nine countries. The book received the first Longman-History Today Trustees’ Award.
In May 2004, he published The Mystery of Olga Chekhova, which describes the experiences of the Chekhov and Knipper families from before the Russian revolution until after the Second World War. His Russian research assistant Dr Lyubov Vinogradova and he then edited and translated the war time papers of the novelist Vasily Grossman, published in 2005 as A Writer at War – Vasily Grossman with the Red Army 1941-1945.
He then published a completely revised edition of his 1982 history of the Spanish Civil War, with a great deal of new material from Spanish sources and foreign archives. This came out in Spain in September 2005 as La guerra civil española where it became the No.1 Bestseller for three months, spent five months in the top ten and received the La Vanguardia prize for non-fiction. It appeared in English in spring, 2006, as The Battle for Spain – The Spanish Civil War 1936-1939.
D-Day – The Battle for Normandy, published in June 2009, was a No 1 Bestseller in seven countries, including the UK and France, and in the top ten in another eight countries. It received the Prix Henry Malherbe in France and the Westminster Medal from the Royal United Services Institute. His next book, The Second World War, published in June 2012, was a No 1 bestseller in Britain and four other countries, and a bestseller in another five. In 2026 it was nominated by Collider as one of the top five books, both fiction and non-fiction, of the 21st Century.
Ardennes 1944 – Hitler’s Last Gamble (published 2015) became another international bestseller and was shortlisted for the Prix Médicis in France. His next book, Arnhem – The Battle for the Bridges (2018) was another international bestseller. Since then, he has published Russia – Revolution and Civil War 1917-1921 (2023) and Rasputin and the Downfall of the Romanovs (2026), both Sunday Times bestsellers.
He has also contributed to several books including The British Army, Manpower and Society into the Twenty-First Century, edited by Hew Strachan; Russia – War, Peace & Diplomacy in honour of the late John Erickson; Kokoda – Beyond the Legend (2017) edited by Karl James; and The End of 1942 – A turning point in World War II and in the Comprehension of the Final Solution? (Yad Vashem, 2018) edited by Dina Porat and Dan Michman.
Antony Beevor was made a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government in 1997 and in 2008 was awarded the Order of the Cross of Terra Mariana by the President of Estonia. In 2016 he was made Commandeur de l’Ordre de la Couronne in Belgium for his book on the Ardennes. He was knighted by King Charles when Prince of Wales in 2017. He has lectured at many staff colleges and military headquarters in different countries. In 2018, the British Army and the German Bundeswehr based their first major study of urban warfare, led by General Sir Patrick Sanders, chief of the general staff, on ‘Beevor’s Lessons from Urban Conflicts’.
He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1999 and the Royal Historical Society in 2017. He was the 2002-2003 Lees-Knowles lecturer at Cambridge. He has been a Visiting Professor at Birkbeck College, University of London and at the University of Kent. He is an honorary Fellow of King’s College London and has also received honorary degrees of Doctor of Letters from the Universities of Kent, Bath, East Anglia and York. He was a trustee of the London Library from 2002-2004 and a judge of the British Academy Book Prize and the David Cohen Prize in 2004. He was a member of the Council of the Society of Authors (having been Chair from 2003-2005) until he resigned in 2022 over the actions of the CEO and the leadership of the management committee. From 2018 to 2021 he was a member of the academic advisory committee with John Gray and Timothy Snyder for the European Centre for Tolerance and Reconciliation.
In 2014 he received the Pritzker Literature Award for Lifetime Achievement in Military Writing, and in 2016 the Norton Medlicott Medal for Service to History. He is married to the writer and biographer Artemis Cooper and they have a daughter Nella and a son Adam.
Contact address: c/o Michael Dean, Andrew Nurnberg Associates, 43 Great Russell Street, London, WC1B 3PD mdean@nurnberg.co.uk
Part of The Times and Sunday Times Cheltenham Literature Festival, Antony Beevor reveals how the Siberian peasant Grigori Rasputin undermined the Romanov dynasty. He discusses how the “mad monk” shaped the fate of an empire.
Find out moreIn a dedicated study day titled History in Action: Russia and Revolution, Antony Beevor delivers a lecture on the downfall of the Romanovs. He explores Rasputin’s influence and the collapse of Russian autocracy.
Find out moreSir Antony Beevor presents a conference examining how Grigori Rasputin spellbound Tsar Nicholas II and Alexandra. The talk dives into the collapse of Russian autocracy and the power of myth.
Find out moreExplore Antony Beevor's complete collection of acclaimed military histories, from bestselling classics to his latest works.
