One of Scotland’s most revered writers, Neal Ascherson HRSA was born in Edinburgh in 1932. His books include The King Incorporated Leopold 11 (Allen & Unwin, 1963); Games with Shadows (Radius, 1989) The Polish August (Penguin, 1981); Black Sea (Jonathan Cape, 1995); Stone Voices (Granta, 2002) and a novel, The Death of the Fronsac (Apollo, 2017). Black Sea was the Saltire Scottish book of the year in 1996 and was given the PEN silver award for non-fiction.
Ascherson was the central and eastern European correspondent for The Observer for many years. He covered southern and central Africa for The Observer and The Scotsman and was the Scottish Politics correspondent for The Scotsman from 1975 - 1979. He was the editor of Public Archaeology from 1998 until 2008, and a columnist for The Observer and the Independent on Sunday from 1985 until 2008. As a reviewer he contributes regularly to the New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books. He lives in London and Argyll.
