Eric Waugh

Irish-born Eric Waugh was schoolteacher in a lonely school in the English Lakes, a radio talk show host in Chicago and a university researcher in Europe and America before settling into his long-term career as a journalist. As a BBC correspondent for many years his voice became one of the best-known on the air waves at home and abroad during the height of the Irish Troubles in the 1970s and '80s. 'Wages of War' is his debut novel, written, he says, with deep feeling for the gallant men and, particularly, the women (one of whom is the heroine of his story), who worked underground in Occupied France in daily peril of their lives in the Second World War. Waugh lives in Ireland with his wife, a well-known Irish landscape painter; but he knows France intimately, where one of their two daughters has chosen to live. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in 2006.