Philip Kerr

Philip Kerr (born 22 February 1956) is a British author.

Born in Edinburgh, in a Baptist family, Kerr was educated there at Stewart's Melville College and at a grammar school in Northampton. He studied at the University of Birmingham from 1974 to 1980, gaining a master's degree in law and philosophy. Kerr worked as an advertising copywriter for Saatchi and Saatchi before becoming a full-time writer in 1989. A writer of both adult fiction and non-fiction, he is known for the Bernie Gunther series of historical thrillers set in Germany and elsewhere during the 1930s, the Second World War and the Cold War. He has also written children's books under the name P.B. Kerr, including the Children of the Lamp series.

Kerr has written for The Sunday Times, the Evening Standard and the New Statesman. He is married to fellow novelist Jane Thynne; the two live in Wimbledon, London, and have three children.

Awards and honours

In 1993, Kerr was named in Granta's list of Best Young British Novelists. In 2009, If the Dead Rise Not won the world's most lucrative crime fiction award, the RBA International Prize for Crime Writing worth €125,000. The book also won the British Crime Writers' Association's Ellis Peters Historic Crime Award that same year.

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Four controversial IOC Presidents

Inside The Games 19 Mar 2025
IOC ... Few, if any, of his fellow presidents have appeared in the pages of a bestselling fiction novel, but a starkly unflattering portrayal of his pro-Nazi sentiments at the Berlin Games appears in If The Dead Rise Not by Philip Kerr.Avery Brundage.
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