[close] Andrew Norman Wilson is an English writer known for his critical biographies, novels and works of popular and cultural history. He is also a columnist for the London Evening Standard and was an occasional contributor to the Daily Mail,Times Literary Supplement, New Statesman, The Spectator and The Observer.

A. N. Wilson was educated at Rugby School and New College, Oxford. Destined originally for ordination in the Church of England, Wilson entered St Stephen's House, the High Church theological hall at Oxford, but left at the end of his first year.
His particular slant on biography, and to some extent his take on the Victorian era topics he has covered in God's Funeral and The Victorians, can be traced to his early failure to take Holy Orders and become a priest. His books on Leo Tolstoy (Whitbread Award for best biography of 1988), C. S. Lewis, Hilaire Belloc, and Jesus Christ are all critical of religious belief.

Despite a reputation gained early in his career of being a 'Young Fogey', Wilson is also noted for mischief, for example in comments on the parentage of Queen Victoria, and his dissenting views, which many found disrespectful, of Iris Murdoch.
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