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Tom Rob Smith was born in 1979 to a Swedish mother and English father, both antique dealers, and brought up in South London, where he now lives. He started writing plays at school and continued at St. John's, Cambridge. After graduating from Cambridge University in 2001, he completed his studies in Italy, studying creative writing for a year. He also worked as a scriptwriter.
His first novel, Child 44, about a series of child murders in Stalinist Russia, appeared in early 2008. It was awarded the 2008 Ian Fleming Steel Dagger for Best Thriller of the year by the Crime Writer's Association. It was recently a Barnes & Noble recommended book. On July 29, 2008 the book was named on the long list for the 2008 Man Booker Prize. In November 2008, he was nominated for the 2008 Costa First Novel Award (former Whitbread).
His second novel, The Secret Speech, the follow-up to Child 44, was published in May 2009 and the final novel in the series, Agent 6, was published in July 2011.
His latest is The Farm, published in June 2014. Smith has also written London Spy, a five part drama series which will broadcast on BBC 2 in the UK in 2015
Tom Rob Smith's website
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What is the real Secret Speech, and why did you choose that as the backdrop for this story?
"The Secret Speech" was perhaps one of the most remarkable speeches ever delivered in modern history. Its effect on a nation and indeed around the world was dramatic. It was delivered by Premier Khrushchev in 1956, three years after Stalin's death, to the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. In the speech, Khrushchev attacks some of the brutal and savage measures Stalin used to control his population. It was the first time a public and influential attack had been made upon Stalin, an attack from the very epicenter of the Soviet government. Many of the officials listening to the speech simply couldn't believe the words they were hearing. To many, Stalin had been positioned as a god, above reproach. More interesting to me were the feelings of the people who had been complicit in Stalin's crimes. Khrushchev's speech seemed to herald a new era of openness in a society where many people had committed terrible crimes they wished to hide.
It was this point that led me to use it as backdrop for a story. Self-evidently, a second book is about what follows after the first ...
Boris Akunin is the pen name of Grigory Chkhartishvili, who was born in the Republic of Georgia in 1956. A philologist, critic, essayist, and translator of Japanese, Akunin published his first detective stories in 1998 and ... (more)
If you enjoyed:
The Secret Speech
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David Benioff (born David Friedman but changed his name to take his mother's maiden name) was born and raised in New York City and attended Dartmouth College and the University of California at Irvine. His father, Stephen ... (more)
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