Andrew Simpkin – A Novel Career

Old Boy Andrew Simpkin has pursued a highly creative career path since leaving Merchant Taylors’ Schools in 1985. As well as being a recognised artist, Andrew is a bilingual Novelist (in English and French), and a Literary Translator.
It is in his capacity as a Literary Translator that Andrew has recently adapted the classic novel “Les Rois Maudits” (“The Accursed Kings”) by eminent French Novelist Maurice Druon, into an English language version. Druon, who died in 2009 at the age of 90, won many literary awards and was a member of the prestigious Académie Française.

Druon is best known for “Les Rois Maudits”, a series of seven historical novels that were originally published in the 1950s. The novels were subsequently adapted for French television in the 1970s and then again in 2005. Such is the impact of his writing that popular Fantasy Fiction Writer George RR Martin, credited Druon’s novels as the inspiration behind his own series of novels “A Song of Ice and Fire”, which became the hugely successful “Game of Thrones” television series.

Andrew’s much anticipated English language adaption of Druon’s novel is now available from publisher HarperCollins under the title “The King Without a Kingdom”.
Andrew comments:
“Translating this work has been both a constant source of fascination, thanks to the insights it gives into the Hundred Years War from the French perspective, and also a huge challenge because of its never-ending sentences and technical, medieval language. This volume of “Les Rois Maudits” also contains the longest, most extraordinary monologue in modern literature!”
For further information on Andrew’s forthcoming publication, please go to:
http://www.harpercollins.co.uk/9780007491377/the-king-without-a-kingdom …