Giles Milton - Interests and Influences

Interests and Influences

The author's non-fiction titles display a particular interest in the lesser known adventurers of the 16th and 17th centuries, and the ill-treatment of indigenous populations as the first English merchants and traders moved into newly colonized lands.

The books draw on unpublished source material – diaries, journals and private letters – as well as archival documentation kept by the East India Company and now housed in the British Library. He also cites contemporary published accounts, notably the 1589 anthology, The Principall Navigations, Voiages, and Discoveries of the English Nation by Richard Hakluyt and Purchas, his Pilgrimage; or, Relations of the World and the Religions observed in all Ages, 1613, by Samuel Purchas. In researching his 2008 work, Paradise Lost, Smyrna 1922, he collected an extensive archive of unpublished diaries and private letters written by the Levantines of Smyrna.

His most recent title, Wolfram: The Boy who went to War, published in February 2011, is an account of the wartime experiences of the author's German father-in-law, Wolfram Aichele, in the Ukraine, in Normandy, and as a prisoner-of-war in England and America, based upon wartime letters, diaries and interviews.