Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill, KG, OM, CH, TD, PC, FRS, was a British politician known chiefly for his leadership of the United Kingdom during World War II. He is widely regarded as one of the great wartime leaders. He served as Prime Minister from 1940 to 1945 and again from 1951 to 1955. A noted statesman and orator, Churchill was also an officer in the British Army, a historian, writer, and artist. To date, he is the only British Prime Minister to have received the Nobel Prize in Literature, and the first person to be recognised as an honorary citizen of the United States.

In addition to his careers as a soldier and politician, Churchill was a prolific writer under the variant of his full name "Winston S. Churchill". After being commissioned into the 4th Queen's Own Hussars in 1895, Churchill gained permission to observe the Cuban War of Independence, and sent war reports to The Daily Graphic. He continued his war journalism in British India, at the Siege of Malakand, then in the Sudan during the Mahdist War, and in southern Africa during the Second Boer War. Churchill's fictional output included one novel and a short story, but his main output comprised non-fiction. After he was elected as an MP, over 130 of his speeches or parliamentary answers were also published in pamphlets or booklets; many were subsequently published in collected editions.

Churchill received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1953 "for his mastery of historical and biographical description as well as for brilliant oratory in defending exalted human values". Out of respect for the well-known American author, Winston Churchill, Winston S. Churchill offered to use his middle initial in any works that he authored.