John Le Carre
Novelist
British author known for The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, and other bestselling espionage novels. He received the prestigious Goethe Medal in 2011.
He studied at Lincoln College, Oxford and worked covertly for the British Security Service, MI5, spying on far-left groups in an attempt to hunt down information on possible Soviet agents.
He was born David John Moore Cornwell and chose to write under the pseudonym of John le Carre.
He married Alison Ann Veronica Sharp in 1954; the couple had three sons before divorcing in 1971. The following year, he wed editor Valerie Jane Eustace, with whom he had a fourth son.
He wrote an extremely controversial piece about the government's dealings with Saddam Hussein and Iraq.