Born in London in 1908, Ian Fleming was educated at Eton College. He worked as assistant to the Director of Naval Intelligence, Admiral Godfrey, in WWII, before joining Kemsley Newspapers as Foreign Manager of The Sunday Times. Here he ran a network of overseas editorial correspondents who were intimately involved in the Cold War.
Fleming’s first novel, Casino Royale, was published in 1953, a spy thriller which introduced James Bond to the world. It became an instant hit in the UK – and when JFK included his fourth novel, From Russia with Love, in his favourite book list, success followed on a global scale. The 007 books were written in Jamaica, a country Fleming fell in love with during the war and where he built his house, GoldenEye. Weaving in his many interests and pastimes – from cards to golf and cars – his wartime intelligence and travel experiences, the James Bond series had an authority with a universal appeal. Fleming went on to write 14 007 titles, publishing one a year until his death, selling over 100 million copies to date.
Fleming’s children adventure story about a magical car, written in 1961 for his only child, Caspar, went on to become the well-loved novel and film, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. He also wrote two non-fiction books, The Diamond Smugglers and Thrilling Cities.
Charlie Higson is an acclaimed author, comedy writer, producer, actor and James Bond aficionado. He started writing when he was ten years old, but it was a long time before he was paid for doing it. After university he sang in a pop group, The Higsons, and then became a painter and decorator. He started writing for TV on Saturday Night Live and went on to co-create the hugely successful BBC comedy series, The Fast Show, in which he also appeared. Other TV work includes Randall & Hopkirk (Deceased), Swiss Toni and Jekyll & Hyde.
Charlie is the author of five bestselling Young Bond books, the adult Bond book, On His Majesty’s Secret Service, five adult thrillers, including Whatever Gets You Through The Night, Full Whack and King of the Ants, as well as a young adult apocalyptic thriller series, The Enemy, which he wrote to frighten his youngest son. His first non-fiction book, Willie, Willie, Harry, Stee, a history of the monarchy, was published October 2025.
Vaseem is the author of Quantum of Menace, the first in a series featuring Q from the world of James Bond. His follow-up, The Man with the Golden Compass, is set for release in 2026.
Vaseem is also the author of two acclaimed crime series set in India. The first of his Baby Ganesh Agency books, The Unexpected Inheritance of Inspector Chopra, was selected by the Sunday Times as one of the 40 best crime novels published in 2015-2020. Translated into 17 languages, it introduces Inspector Chopra of the Mumbai police and his sidekick, a one-year-old baby elephant.
The first in his 1950s-set Malabar House series, Midnight at Malabar House, won the CWA Historical Dagger Award. More recently, City of Destruction, the fifth in the series, won the Capital Crime Fingerprint Award for Historical Crime Fiction Novel of the Year. In 2025, Vaseem’s first psychological thriller, set in small town America, The Girl in Cell A, was published.
Born in London, Vaseem spent a decade in India as a management consultant. When not writing, he works at University College London’s Department of Security and Crime Science including the Dawes Centre for Future Crime. In 2023, Vaseem was elected the first non-white Chair of the Crime Writers’ Association (the CWA), the oldest and largest association of crime writers in the UK.
As of 2025, Raymond Benson is the author of over forty published books. In 1984, Benson wrote The James Bond Bedside Companion, which covers Ian Fleming, the official novels and the films. He is most well-known as the first American to be commissioned to write adult continuation James Bond novels (six original adventures, three film novelisations, and three short stories published between 1997–2002) and most recently the first Felix Leiter solo adventure, The Hook and the Eye.
His critically acclaimed best-selling five-book serial, The Black Stiletto, is in development to be a possible feature film or television series. Recent notable suspense titles include The Mad, Mad Murders of Marigold Way, which won the 2022 IPPY Gold Medal in Mystery from the Independent Publisher Book Awards; Hotel Destiny: A Ghost Noir; Blues in the Dark; In the Hush of the Night; and The Secrets on Chicory Lane.
Raymond is also a sought-after media tie-in scribe and ghostwriter, having penned books for such series as Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell, Metal Gear Solid, Hitman, and more. He is a concert-level pianist with a lengthy background in theatrical composing, and he has his own YouTube channel. As a film historian, Raymond writes for Cinema Retro magazine, has taught college-level courses, and continues to lecture on film in the Chicago USA area.
Kim Sherwood’s first novel, Testament (2018), won the Bath Novel Award and Harper’s Bazaar Big Book Award, was longlisted for the Desmond Elliot Prize and shortlisted for the Author’s Club Best First Novel Pick. In 2019, she was shortlisted for The Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. Alongside her own writing, Kim lectures in creative writing at the University of Edinburgh.
Kim has an interesting 007 connection, as the granddaughter of actor George Baker who appeared in several of the films. Baker played Sir Hilary Bray in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969), played a NASA engineer in You Only Live Twice (1967) and also appeared in The Spy Who Loved Me (1977).
In 2021, Kim began writing the Double O series for Ian Fleming Publications and HarperCollins, expanding the James Bond universe with a new cast of agents for the 21st century. The first title, Double or Nothing, was released in 2022, and the follow-up, A Spy Like Me, was published in 2024. A Spy Like Me listed for the 2024 McIlvanney Prize: Scottish Crime Book of the Year, making it the first Bond novel to be listed for a literary award. Her third Double O book, Hurricane Room, will be published in May 2026.
Kim’s 2023 novel, A Wild & True Relation, was described by Dame Hilary Mantel as “a rarity – a novel as remarkable for the vigour of the storytelling as for its literary ambition. Kim Sherwood is a writer of capacity, potency and sophistication.”
Anthony Horowitz is one of the most prolific and successful writers working in the UK – juggling writing books, TV series, films, plays and a successful journalism career. Best known for his Alex Rider adventures, he works mainly in the spy, thriller and mystery genres. His Hawthorne stories, in which he appears as a character, has sold well over a million copies.
He is responsible for creating and writing some of the UK’s most beloved television series including Foyle’s War and a trio of mysteries based on his own novels: Magpie Murders, Moonflower Murders and Marble Hall Murders, starring Lesley Manville.
Anthony Horowitz was chosen to write three official James Bond continuation novels, Trigger Mortis (2015), Forever and a Day (2018), and With a Mind to Kill (2022), all of which draw on original material by Ian Fleming.
Sebastian Faulks is a British novelist, journalist and broadcaster. He is the author of a number of award-winning novels, and is best known for his series of three books set in France – The Girl at the Lion d’Or, Birdsong and Charlotte Gray.
Having previously worked as a teacher in Camden Town, Faulks began as a journalist for the Telegraph, and later the Independent. In1984, he published his first novel, A Trick of the Light, and continued to write fiction alongside his journalistic career, eventually becoming a full-time author in the mid-nineties. Faulks was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1993, and appoined CBE for services to literature in 2002.
To mark the 2008 centenary of Ian Fleming’s birth, Faulks was commissioned to write a new James Bond novel. He produced Devil May Care, an immediate best-seller in the UK.
Jeffery Deaver is an international number-one bestselling author. He has served two terms as president of Mystery Writers of America, and was recently named a Grand Master of MWA, whose ranks include Agatha Christie, Ellery Queen, Mary Higgins Clark and Walter Mosely.
Deaver has written over forty novels, three collections of short stories, a non-fiction law book and the lyrics for a country-western album. Many of his novels have been adapted for the screen, including his books, A Maiden’s Grave for HBO and The Bone Collector for Universal Pictures.
In 2011, Deaver wrote Carte Blanche, a James Bond continuation novel set in a post-9/11 world, reimagining 007 for a new global landscape.
Described by his biographer Zachary Leader as ‘the finest English comic novelist’ of his age, Sir Kingley Amis was a jack of all literary trades, writing everything from restaurant reviews, radio plays, political polemics, science fiction and poetry.
Amis produced 24 novels, more than a dozen collections of poetry, short stories and criticism and a large miscellany of other work, including his own memoirs.
At Oxford, he met Philip Larkin, with whom he formed the most important friendship of his life. Larkin would go on to provide significant encouragement and advice during the writing of Amis’ second novel – and his first success – Lucky Jim. It was through this work that he quickly became associated with the Angry Young Men literary movement.
Amis was not held back by the boundaries of genre, and by the late 1960s, he began composing critical works connected with Bond. In 1965, he wrote the popular James Bond Dossier, as well as The Book of Bond. In 1968, Amis wrote Colonel Sun, which was published under the pseudonym Robert Markham.
Amis was knighted in 1990, and he died five years later, at the age of 73.
William Boyd is an author, screenwriter and playwright of world-wide acclaim. His novels such as Any Human Heart, Restless and A Good Man in Africa have been adapted for the screen, with Any Human Heart’s Channel 4 adaptation winning a BAFTA for ‘Best Series’ in 2010. His works have been translated into over thirty languages.
Born in Accra, Ghana, William Boyd has lived and worked around the world, studying at universities in Nice, Glasgow, and Oxford. He later lectured in English Literature at St Hilda’s College, Oxford, and was awarded fellowships by both the Royal Society of Literature and Jesus College, Oxford. Boyd is an Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and was appointed CBE in 2005.
In 2013, he wrote Solo, a James Bond novel set six years after The Man with the Golden Gun, which follows Bond on a covert mission during a civil war in the fictional West African nation of Zanzarim.
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