Nicholas Rankin – Year of election 2009

Nicholas Rankin first learned to read in Kenya during Mau-Mau, and says he has been sheltering in books ever since. His first book, Dead Man’s Chest (1987), following Robert Louis Stevenson from Scotland to Samoa, told how he read Stevenson’s Fables aloud to Jorge Luis Borges; Graham Greene called it “a most enjoyable travel book”. Rankin worked for 20 years at BBC World Service, ending up as Chief Producer (Arts), and made radio features on writers from Honoré de Balzac and Miguel de Cervantes to Vladimir Nabokov and George Orwell. His second book, Telegram from Guernica, was a biography of the neglected war correspondent George Lowther Steer.

His most recent work, Churchill’s Wizards: the British genius for deception 1914-1945, published in 2008, is a study of writers and artists at war. Writing in The Daily Telegraph, Michael Bywater called it “a book of marvellous yarns”.