A. N. Wilson

Andrew Norman Wilson (born 27 October 1950) is an English writer and newspaper columnist known for his critical biographies, novels and works of popular history. He is an occasional columnist for the Daily Mail and a former columnist for the London Evening Standard. He has been an occasional contributor to The Times Literary Supplement, New Statesman, The Spectator and The Observer. Family and education Wilson was born in Stone in Staffordshire to a father who became the managing director of Wedgwood, the pottery company. He was first educated at St Dominic's Priory School, Stone before moving to Hillstone School (subsequently incorporated into Malvern College) in Great Malvern, Worcestershire, and then at Rugby School from the age of 13, where he read Mao and Marx in his spare time. While at Rugby, he wrote an article for the school magazine arguing that public schools should be abolished. The national press became interested in the story, with the Daily Express headlining its account "Red rebel in Tom Brown's school". "Reporters arrived at the school gates, wanting to interview me, but my housemaster, wisely, would not let me talk to them", Wilson told Hunter Davies in 1993. Wilson went to New College, Oxford, graduating in 1972. He had originally entered St Stephen's House, Oxford, a Church of England seminary, with the intention of being ordained as a priest, but left the college after only one year of study, and five years after graduation published the novel Unguarded Hours (1978) based upon his experiences at the seminary and his perception of its homoerotic atmosphere. Wilson taught English at Merchant Taylors' School, Northwood, for two years and then spent seven years as a lecturer in medieval literature at St Hugh's College and New College, Oxford. He married the Shakespearean scholar Katherine Duncan-Jones in 1971, before his graduation. They had two daughters, Emily Wilson (born 1971) and Beatrice "Bee" Wilson (born 1974), and divorced in 1990. He is now married to the art historian Ruth Guilding, with whom he has a third daughter, the painter Georgina "Georg" Wilson.