Author and biology teacher Simon Mawer was born in England in 1948. He studied at Somerset's Millfield School and Oxford's Brasenose College, receiving a degree in zoology. Mawer's first novel, Chimera, won the McKitterick Prize, while The Fall earned the 2003 Boardman Tasker Prize for Mountain Literature. He has written several other novels, as well as the exhibition companion volume Gregor Mendel: Planting the Seeds of Genetics. His novel, Tightrope, made the New Zealand Best Seller List in 2015 and won the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction.
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