Frederick Forsyth was born in Ashford, England, in 1938. At age seventeen, Forsyth decided he was ready to start experiencing life for himself, so he left school and traveled to Spain. There he briefly attended the University of Granada before returning to England and joining the Royal Air Force. He served with the RAF from 1956 to 1958, earning his wings when he was just nineteen years old. Forsyth's dream, however, was to be a foreign correspondent, and he eventually left the RAF to become a reporter for the Eastern Daily Press, Reuters News Agency, which sent him to France and Germany, and the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). While with the BBC, Forsyth was sent to Nigeria to… cover an uprising in the Biafra region. As he learned more about the conflict, Forsyth became sympathetic to the rebel cause; however, he was pulled from Nigeria and reassigned to London when he reported this viewpoint. Furious, he resigned and returned to Nigeria as a freelance reporter, eventually writing The Biafra Story and later, Emeka, a biography of the rebel leader Chukwuemeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu. Upon his return to England in 1970, Forsyth began writing fiction. His first novel, The Day of the Jackal, was inspired by rumors he'd heard while in France in the early 1960s of a plot to assassinate President Charles DeGaulle. The book won an Edgar Allan Poe award from the Mystery Writers of America. In his next two books, Forsyth again made use of his own travels and experiences in choosing the setting: The Odessa File follows a German reporter's search for a Nazi war criminal, while The Dogs of War is about a mercenary who orchestrates a military coup in Africa. Other bestsellers include The Fourth Protocol, Devil's Alternative, The Negotiator, The Deceiver, The Fist of God, and Icon. These books are suspenseful, tightly written, and creatively plotted, and many of them have been made into films.