Piers Paul Read is a British novelist, historian, and biographer, born on 7 March 1941 in Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire. He gained recognition in 1974 with his book of reportage, Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors, which was later adapted into a feature film and documentary.

Read was educated at St. John's College, Cambridge, where he studied history. His father was the poet, art critic, and anarchist theorist, Sir Herbert Read.

In addition to his novels, Read is a dramatist and television scriptwriter. Some of his popular works include The Professor's Daughter, A Married Man, and A Season in the West. Over the years, he has produced numerous authorized biographies and popular history books aimed at a general audience.

Read has lived and worked in both the United Kingdom and the United States, where many of his recent works have been published. He has been awarded the Sir Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize for The Junkers, the Hawthornden Prize and Somerset Maugham Award for Monk Dawson, the Thomas More Medal for Alive, and the Enid McLeod Award for The Free Frenchman.

He served as an Adjunct Professor of Writing at Columbia University in New York in 1980 and was Chairman of the Catholic Writers' Guild from 1992 to 1997. Read is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

His works also include thrillers such as The Professor’s Daughter (1971), The Villa Golitsyn (1981), On the Third Day (1990), A Patriot in Berlin (1995), Knights of the Cross (1997), and The Death of a Pope (2009), which reflect his historical, political, and religious interests.

Read's papers are housed in the Special Collections section of the Brotherton Library in Leeds. He married Emily Boothby in 1967 in Strasbourg and they have lived in various countries, finally settling in London in 1980. They have four children and six grandchildren.