John le Carré is the pseudonym of David John Moore Cornwell. Born in Poole, Dorset in 1931, he was educated at Sherborne School and studied German literature at the University of Bern, Switzerland before going up to Oxford. There he read Modern Languages at Lincoln College and was awarded a First Class Honours degree. After teaching at Eton from 1956 to 1958, he spent five years in the British Foreign Service as Second Secretary in the British Embassy in Bonn and later as Political Consul in Hamburg. He left the Service in 1964, the same year he won the Somerset Maugham Award for young writers for The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963). His first novel, Call for the Dead (1961), had introduced the character of George Smiley, who features in a further eight novels. Many of le Carré's books have also been filmed, most notably The Spy who Came in from the Cold (with Richard Burton in 1965) and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974), which was made into an acclaimed BBC television serial starring Alec Guinness in 1979. Cornwell died in December 2020, having published 25 novels and a memoir. His 26th novel, Silverview, was published posthumously in 2021.