John le Carré was born in 1931. For six decades, he wrote novels that came to define our age. The son of a confidence trickster, he spent his childhood between boarding school and the London underworld. At sixteen he found refuge at the university of Bern, then later at Oxford. A spell of teaching at Eton led him to a short career in British Intelligence (MI5&6). He published his debut novel, Call for the Dead , in 1961 while still a secret servant. His third novel, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold , secured him a worldwide reputation, which was consolidated by the acclaim for his trilogy Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy , The Honourable Schoolboy and Smiley's People . At the end of the Cold War, le Carré widened his scope to explore an international landscape including the arms trade and the War on Terror.

His memoir, The Pigeon Tunnel , was published in 2016 and the last George Smiley novel, A Legacy of Spies , appeared in 2017. He died on 12 December 2020. His posthumous novel Silverview was published in 2021.