Les Carlyon was born in northern Victoria in 1942. He has been editor of the Melbourne Age, editor-in-chief of the Herald and Weekly Times group, as well as the winner of two Walkley Awards. Les Carlyon’s The Great War was published in 2006 to universal acclaim and became one of Australia’s non-fiction bestsellers. It was the joint winner of the inaugural Prime Minister’s Prize for Australian History in 2007 and was honoured by the Australian Book Industry Awards, winning the Australian Book of the Year and the Best General Non-Fiction book.

The Great War is the sequel to Les Carlyon’s Gallipoli, published in 2001 to enormous critical and commercial success in Australia, New Zealand and Great Britain and now widely regarded as the most definitive history of the campaign yet written. Gallipoli won the Queensland Premier’s Literary Award for Best History Book and the Australian Publishers’ Association Readers’ Choice Award. It has never been out of print and has sold more than 240,000 copies worldwide.