A. N. Wilson is a distinguished novelist, biographer, critic and Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He has won several prestigious awards, including the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize (for The Sweets of Pimlico and The Laird of Abbotsford), the 1981 Somerset Maugham Award (for The Healing Art) and the 1988 Whitbread Award (for the biography Tolstoy). He has also written a volume of guinea-pig stories called Hazel, and a tale of an old cat looking back over his life, Stray, both of which will be published by Corvus in 2012.