Andrew Norman Wilson (born 27 October 1950) is an English writer and newspaper columnist, known for his critical biographies, novels, works of popular history and religious views. He is an occasional columnist for the Daily Mail and former columnist for the London Evening Standard, and has been an occasional contributor to the Times Literary Supplement, New Statesman, The Spectator and The Observer.
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Wilson was educated at Rugby School and New College, Oxford. Destined originally for ordination in the Church of England, Wilson entered St Stephen's House, the High Church theological hall at Oxford, but left at the end of his first year.
In the late 1980s he publicly stated that he was an atheist and published a pamphlet Against Religion in the Chatto & Windus CounterBlasts series; however, religious and ecclesiological themes continue to inform his work. For nearly 30 years he continued to be both a skeptic, and a prominent atheist.
In April 2009 he published an article in the Daily Mail affirming his rediscovery of faith, and conversion to Christianity, attacking at the same time both academic and media atheists.[1]
He has covered his particular slant on biography and, to some extent his take on the Victorian era topics, in God's Funeral and The Victorians, which can be traced to this religious ambivalence. His books on Leo Tolstoy (Whitbread Award for best biography of 1988), C. S. Lewis, Hilaire Belloc, and Jesus Christ are all simultaneously sympathetic to and critical of religious belief. His latest work, Dante in Love published in 2011, presents a glittering study of the great Italian poet Dante Alighieri, as an artist and philosopher, also depicting an in-depth portrait of medieval Florence in order to make readers understand the literary and cultural background that engendered the Tuscan's masterpiece, The Divine Comedy.
Wilson has a reputation, gained early in his career, of being a 'young fogey'. He holds controversial views and presents them to entertaining effect, for example in repeated appearances on BBC Radio 4's Any Questions.[2]
Wilson has been occasionally criticized for his prose style. Nevertheless, his 2007 novel Winnie and Wolf was longlisted for the Man Booker prize. His non-fiction has been widely praised. Kathryn Hughes described his 2002 book The Victorians as "a magnificent achievement: plucky, engaged and full of awe at the way we continue to live out its inheritance today".[3]
After Life in the Freezer was broadcast, Wilson, then a television reviewer for The Independent, wrote a column accusing the production team of staging a harrowing sequence in which a leopard seal killed and dismembered a young penguin. He claimed that the chances of filming natural behaviour like this were far too low and that the crew must have thrown baby penguins to the seal until they got the shot they wanted.
Alastair Fothergill responded by threatening to sue. In a private settlement, Wilson was forced to publish an apology and retraction acknowledging that there had been no basis for his claims. The Independent also paid an undisclosed sum of money, which Fothergill and David Attenborough donated to a fund for the penguins of the Falkland Islands.
Wilson had made similar claims about Attenborough's previous series, The Trials of Life, regarding the filming of the Malleefowl and been forced to retract those as well.
In August 2006, Wilson's biography of Sir John Betjeman was published. It was then discovered that he had been the victim of a hoax. Wilson later claimed that he has struck back with a hidden message of his own in a reprinting of the book that has yet to be discovered.[4]
A novel sequence referred to as The Lampitt Chronicles: