Nicholas Best grew up in Kenya, of Anglo-Irish origin, and was educated there, in England, and at Trinity College, Dublin. He served a spell in Britain's Grenadier Guards, during which he was airlifted to Belize to prevent its invasion by Guatemalan tanks - an experience that gave him his first short story (in Penthouse) and a satirical novel Where were you at Waterloo? Thereafter he worked in London as a financial journalist before becoming a full time writer. He is the author of Happy Valley: the Story of the English in Kenya, Tennis and the Masai (a comic novel later serialised on Radio 4) and more than a dozen history books, including Trafalgar, The Greatest Day in History (a Waterstone's recommendation of the month) and Five Days that shocked the World, about the end of World War Two. He was the Financial Times fiction critic for ten years and has written also for BBC Radio 4, the Daily Telegraph, Sunday Times, Observer and Times Literary Supplement etc. In 2010, he was long-listed for the inaugural Sunday Times-EFG Private Bank short story award of £25,000, the biggest short story prize in the world.