Roger Crowley

Roger Crowley was born in 1951 and educated at Cambridge University. As the child of a naval family, early experiences of life in Malta gave him a deep interest in the history and culture of the Mediterranean world. After finishing school he spent his summers pottering in Greece and after university the Mediterranean took a deeper hold with a year spent on and off teaching English in Istanbul, exploring the city and walking across much of Western Turkey. In recent years he has made return trips to the Greek-speaking world, including two visits to Mount Athos, spiritual home of the Byzantine tradition. All this resulted in his well-reviewed books on the great sixteenth-century contest between the Ottomans and Hapsburgs for control of the Mediterranean.

Roger has talked about the empires of the Mediterranean to audiences as diverse as Melvin Bragg's BBC programme In Our Time, the Center for Naval Analyses in Washington, NATO, the Hay Festival and his local Women's Institute. He has recently contributed to the forthcoming TV series Ottomans versus Christians: A Clash of Civilizations in 16th Century Europe. He is married and lives in England in the Gloucestershire countryside.

The author’s official web site is rogercrowley.co.uk