Arcadia (Pears) - Author Bio

Author Bio
• Birth—January 1, 1955
• Where—Coventry, England, UK
• Education—Ph.D., Oxford University
• Awards—Martin Beck Award (Sweden)
• Currently—lives in Oxford, England


Iain Pears is an English art historian, novelist, and journalist. He was educated at Warwick School, Warwick, Wadham College and Wolfson College, Oxford.

Before writing, he worked as a reporter for the BBC, Channel 4 (UK) and ZDF (Germany) and correspondent for Reuters from 1982 to 1990 in Italy, France, UK, and US. In 1987 he became a Getty Fellow in the Arts and Humanities at Yale University.

Pears first came to international prominence with his best selling book An Instance of the Fingerpost (1997), which was translated into several languages. All told, he has published some dozen books—seven in the Jonathan Argyll series (1991-2000) featuring detective art historian Argyll who works with the (fictitious) Italian Art Squad.

In his stand alone novels, Pears is known for experimenting with different narrative structures, presenting four consecutive versions of the same events in An Instance of the Fingerpost, three stories interleaved in The Dream of Scipio (2002), three stories told in reverse chronological order in Stone's Fall (2009), and allowing the reader to switch between multiple narratives in the electronic book version of Arcadia (2015).

Pears currently lives with his wife and children in Oxford. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 2/22/2016.)