Fredick Forsyth was born in 1938 in Ashford, Kent. He was educated at Tonbridge School and Granada University, Spain, before serving in the RAF as a pilot from 1956 to 1958. For three and a half years he worked as a reporter on the Eastern Daily Press in Norfolk, then in 1961 he joined Reuters and was posted the following year, at the age of twenty-three, to Paris as foreign correspondent. He was subsequently sole correspondent in East Germany and Czechoslovakia and, after another period in Paris, he returned to London in 1965 to join the BBC as a radio and television reporter. As assistant diplomatic correspondent he covered the Biafran side of the Biafra-Nigeria war from July until September in 1967, and in February 1968 he left the BBC to return to Biafra; he reported on the war first as a freelance and later for the Daily Express and Time magazine. Fredrick Forsyth, who speaks fluent French, German and Spanish, has travelled widely in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. He has also written The Day of the Jackal, The Odessa File, The Dogs of War and a novella, The Shepherd.