

He has also written Winter in Madrid, a thriller set in Spain in 1940 in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War.ĭark Fire won the 2005 Ellis Peters Historical Dagger, awarded by the Crime Writers' Association (CWA). Sansom has been consulted on the series, which is in the final stages of negotiation. The rest of the Shardlake books are expected to follow. The BBC have commissioned an adaptation of Dissolution with the actor Kenneth Branagh set to star as Shardlake. Shardlake works on commission initially from Thomas Cromwell in Dissolution and Dark Fire and then Thomas Cranmer in Sovereign and Revelation.

He came to prominence with his series set in the reign of Henry VIII in the 16th century, whose main character is the hunchbacked lawyer Matthew Shardlake. He practised for a while in Sussex as a lawyer for the disadvantaged, before quitting in order to work full-time as a writer. After working in a variety of jobs, he decided to retrain as a solicitor. He was born in 1952 and was educated at the University of Birmingham, where he took a BA and then a PhD in history. Christopher John "C.J." Sansom is an English writer of crime novels.
