Michael Wood

Historian, filmmaker and broadcaster, Michael Wood is the author of multiple bestselling books, including four UK number one bestsellers, and well over one hundred documentary films, among them In the Footsteps of Alexander the Great and The Story of India, which the Wall Street Journal described as ‘still the gold standard’ of documentary history-making. His Story of England, which told the tale of one village, Kibworth in Leicestershire, through British history, was called by the Independent ‘the most innovative history series ever on TV’.

In 2013 he became Professor of Public History at the University of Manchester. Michael is a Fellow of the Royal Society for the Arts, the Royal Historical Society and the Society of Antiquaries. He recently received the British Academy President’s Medal for services to History and an OBE for services to broadcasting.

Of his documentary series Story of China (BBC2, 2016) the state news agency in China, Xinhua, said it had ‘transcended the barriers of ethnicity and belief and brought something inexplicably powerful and touching to the TV audience’. Simon and Schuster published his epic one-volume history The Story of China to widespread acclaim in 2020.

To mark the book’s fortieth anniversary, BBC Books published a fully revised and expanded edition of Michael Wood’s In Search of the Dark Ages, which overturned preconceptions of the Early Middle Ages as a shadowy and brutal era when it was first published in 1981. This updated version has all-new chapters on fascinating characters, such Penda of Mercia, Aethelflaed Lady of the Mercians, Hadrian the African, Eadgyth of England, and Wynflaed, providing a more varied and inclusive study on the creation of Britain.

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