John Guy (historian)

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John Guy (born 1949 in Warragul, Australia) is a leading British historian and biographer.

Born in Australia, he moved to Britain with his parents in 1952. He was educated at King Edward VII School in Lytham, and Clare College, Cambridge, where he read History, taking a First. At Cambridge, Guy studied under the Tudor specialist Geoffrey Rudolph Elton. He was awarded a Greene Cup by Clare College and the Yorke Prize by the University of Cambridge. During his academic career he has held posts at St Andrews University (where he is Honorary Professor and was sometime Vice-Principal for Research), Bristol University, UC Berkeley, Rochester and Johns Hopkins. Guy currently teaches at Cambridge University, as a fellow of Clare College, where he teaches part-time so he can devote more time to his writing and broadcasting career.

He is a Tudor history specialist and has written extensively on the subject. His books have been critically acclaimed with his most recent work, My Heart is My Own: the Life of Mary Queen of Scots, being awarded the 2004 Whitbread Biography Award.

His style is one of re-assessment and evaluation and his works often involve him re-telling and re-evaluating history from a novel viewpoint.