Guy Walters - Life and Career

Life and Career

Guy Walters was born in Kensington, London. A descendant of Richard Harris Barham and Edward Augustus Bond, he was educated at Cheam School, Eton College, Westfield College, University of London (now part of Queen Mary, University of London), and is studying for a PhD in history at Newcastle University.

From 1992 to 2000 he worked at The Times. In 2000 he became a novelist. His first book, The Traitor, was published in 2002, and concerns the British Free Corps, a British unit of the Waffen-SS. The Leader (2003) is set in a Britain ruled by Oswald Mosley as a Fascist dictator. The Occupation (2004) takes place during the German Occupation of the Channel Islands. The Colditz Legacy (2005) is set in Colditz Castle during the war and the 1970s. With James Owen, he edited The Voice of War in 2004, a collection of Second World War memoirs. In 2006 he published Berlin Games, a history of the 1936 Berlin Olympics, which was shortlisted for the 2006 William Hill Sports Book of the Year and the 2007 Outstanding Book of the Year by the North American Society for the Sociology of Sport.

In 2009, Walters published Hunting Evil, a history of how the Nazi war criminals escaped after the war, and how they were brought to justice. In October 2007, as part of his research for the book, Walters attempted to visit the alleged Nazi war criminal Erna Wallisch at her flat in Vienna, Austria. Wallisch, a former concentration camp guard at Ravensbrück and Majdanek, was the seventh most wanted person on the Simon Wiesenthal Center's list of suspected war criminals from the Second World War. Wallisch refused to talk to Walters.

Walters has raised questions regarding the veracity of Denis Avey's claims to have smuggled himself into Auschwitz.

He has written for the The Telegraph, Daily Mail and New Statesman.

He lives in Wiltshire with his wife Annabel Venning and two children. His brother, Dominic Walters, was the picture editor of Country Life magazine.