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James Waterson is a graduate of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London and has post-graduate degrees from the University of Dundee and the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona. He travelled and worked in the Middle East, the United States and China for a number of years but now calls Prague home and Dubai the office.
His latest work of historical fiction is 'Bohemundus', the story of the twenty-year duel between the Norman Prince Bohemond of Taranto and the Emperor Alexius with the Byzantine Empire as the prize for the victor. It is a story told among the greatest events of the medieval age, the First Crusade and the conquest of Jerusalem, the Sack of Rome, and the hammer blows that Bohemond and his armies laid upon the Byzantine Empire, and the tale of a boundless adventurer, first among all the knights of Europe, and the supreme hero of the Crusade and of his bitter enemy, one of the greatest of the Roman emperors.
Dracula's Wars, his 2016 history of the long struggle between Christendom and the Ottoman Empire, was his fifth book -although there are about twelve and half million copies of his Oxford University Press textbooks for Chinese children wanting to learn English spread across the Middle Kingdom, an unpublished but finished novel and an unfinishable detective novel that predate the history books.
He was inspired to write Defending Heaven, a history of the Song, Yuan and Ming dynasties by an after dinner chat with Jung Chang at the 2009 Emirates Airlines International Festival of Literature in Dubai.
Sacred Swords, published in 2010, completed a trilogy of books covering the mediaeval Middle East and he likes to think that the idea for it, a history of jihad in the Holy Land during the Crusades period, came to him during a quiet moment in the courtyard of Damascus' Great Mosque but it is just as likely that it was the result of too much shisha smoking and storytelling in the Nogara coffee house just beside the mosque's walls. A Portuguese edition was published in 2012 but he thinks the chances of an all-expenses paid tour of South America to promote it are slim.
The Ismaili Assassins, which grew from his travels in Iran and from a few lines of Dante, was published by Frontline Books in 2008 and has been praised for de-mystifying the sect and yet making them even more intriguing. It was translated into Turkish in 2012 and he hopes the royalties from it will be sufficient to buy a beer in Istanbul airport one day.
His first book, The Knights of Islam, a history of the slave soldiers and sultans of Islam was started on a nearly dead laptop propped up on an ironing board in Shanghai, added to between night shifts in a London bedsit and completed on a building site masquerading as a house in the Appenines, eventually being published in 2007. It was translated into Arabic by the Council of Egypt and a bootleg Polish edition, from which he obtains no royalties, apparently also exists.
He is just completing an illustrated history of the Crusades period, to be published in 2021.
In pursuit of a living wage James has, at various times, been an actor in Chinese movies, a radio host, an oil rig worker, the voice of Chinese Steel, a university lecturer, a nurse and a contadino. He still writes and consults on healthcare and health economics in areas as diverse as disaster management, medication management and children's intensive care.
The book he really wants to write is a history of the archers of the East from the Kyudo archers of Japan through the crossbowmen of China, the Turks and Mongols of Central Asia to the Arab and Persian archers of the Middle East. He shoots a Scythian bow himself and is sure that no publisher would ever consider such a book.
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