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Frederick
Taylor was born in Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, England, and educated
at local state schools and Aylesbury Grammar School. In 1967 he
was awarded a history scholarship to Oxford University, where
he read History and Modern Languages (German). After graduating
he pursued postgraduate studies at the University of Sussex, where
he was awarded a Volkswagen Studentship and travelled widely in
East and West Germany researching a thesis on the German far-right
before 1918. He has since worked as a publisher, a translator
of fiction and non-fiction, a novelist and scriptwriter. He edited
and translated The Goebbels Diaries 1939-1941 as well as several
German works of popular history. |
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Since the publication of Dresden Tuesday
13 February 1945 Fred has lectured widely and appeared on
expert panels, in venues as various as the Hay-on-Wye Festival
(panel with Anthony Beevor and AC Grayling), the Edinburgh Book
Festival (2004 and 2006), the Salisbury Festival, the World
War II Experience Centre Series of Lectures, the Reform Club
(London), and Dresden Town Hall, where in January 2005 he delivered
the keynote lecture (in German) at a day seminar organised by
the Hannah Arendt Institute. Fred has participated in BBC Radio’s
Start the Week and Night Waves and has also
contributed to The Today Programme. He appeared as
an on-screen commentator for Channel 4 Television’s Bomber
Crew and has also been interviewed regularly on National
Public Radio in the USA. His second major historical book, The
Berlin Wall: 13 August 1961 - 9 November 1989, was published
in 2006 in Britain and in June 2007 in the USA.
Dresden has been translated into ten languages, and
The Berlin Wall into fifteen, including most recently
Chinese (in November 2009 he lectured at the Chinese University of Hong Kong). Fred appears as an on-screen commentator both for the History Channel's documentary Busting the Berlin Wall and for PBS's The Wall: A World Divided.
Frederick Taylor's latest book, Exorcising Hitler: The Occupation and Denazification of Germany was published in March 2011 in the UK (by Bloomsbury) and in May 2011 in the USA (by Bloomsbury Press). A German edition will appear from Berlin-Verlag in autumn 2011. Fred will be discussing Exorcising Hitler at the Hay-on-Wye festival on 31 May 2011 in conversation with the well-known British broadcaster and journalist Rosie Goldsmith.
Fred has three grown-up children and lives with his wife,
the American poet and writer Alice Kavounas, in Cornwall, United
Kingdom. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society of Great
Britain. He is represented for books, broadcasting and other
professional activity by the Jane
Turnbull Agency.
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