John le Carré is the nom de plume of David John Moore Cornwell, who was born on 19th October 1931 in Poole, Dorset. He was educated at Sherborne School, the University of Bern and Lincoln College, Oxford, where he graduated with a first-class honours degree in Modern Languages. He taught at Eton from 1956 to 1958 and was a member of the British Foreign Service from 1959 to 1964, serving first as Second Secretary in the British Embassy in Bonn, and subsequently as Political Consul in Hamburg.

He began writing in 1961 and published twenty-six novels and one memoir:

Call for the Dead (1961)
A Murder of Quality (1962)
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963)
The Looking Glass War (1965)
A Small Town in Germany (1968)
The Naive and Sentimental Lover (1971)
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974)
The Honourable Schoolboy (1977)
Smiley's People (1979)
The Little Drummer Girl (1983)
A Perfect Spy (1986)
The Russia House (1989)
The Secret Pilgrim (1991)
The Night Manager (1993)
Our Game (1995)
The Tailor of Panama (1996)
Single & Single (1999)
The Constant Gardener (2001)
Absolute Friends (2003)
The Mission Song (2006)
A Most Wanted Man (2008)
Our Kind of Traitor (2010)
A Delicate Truth (2013)
The Pigeon Tunnel (memoir) (2016)
A Legacy of Spies (2017)
Agent Running in the Field (2019)
Silverview (published posthumously in 2021)

His third novel, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, became an international bestseller, spending 32 weeks at number 1 on the New York Times bestseller list; it was selected as one of the All-Time 100 Novels by Time magazine.

Many of his novels have been made into film, including Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (starring Gary Oldman, Colin Firth, Tom Hardy), The Constant Gardener (Ralph Fiennes and Rachel Weisz), The Russia House (Sean Connery and Michelle Pfeiffer) and The Tailor of Panama (Pierce Brosnan).

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Smiley’s People (starring Alec Guinness), A Perfect Spy (Peter Egan), The Night Manager (Hugh Laurie, Tom Hiddleston, Tom Hollander, Elizabeth Debicki) and The Little Drummer Girl (Florence Pugh and Alexander Skarsgård) have all been adapted for television.

John le Carré declined all British-based honours, but accepted the title of Commandeur de L’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (France) in 2005, and the Goethe Medal (Germany) in 2011. He was also the recipient of the Olof Palme Prize in Stockholm in January 2020. In 2010, he was awarded the Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence, which he received at the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford.

He was an Honorary Fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford and held Honorary Doctorates at Exeter University, the Universities of St. Andrews, Bath, Southampton, Plymouth, Bern, Oxford and Falmouth College of Arts.

He died of pneumonia in Cornwall on 12th December 2020.

A Private Spy, a collection of John le Carré's letters edited by his son, Tim Cornwell, was published by Penguin Random House in 2022.