Elison Ueyr

Alison Weir (in some Russian translations, Weir, Vair) is an English historian and writer who works in the genre of popular history as well as in historical romance.

She was born on 1 January 1951 in the London borough of Lambeth in the United Kingdom. She grew up in Westminster and also lived in Norfolk, Sussex, and Scotland.

At the age of 14, she became interested in history after reading a book by the English writer Ursula Bloom (1892–1984) about Catherine of Aragon. After that, she began reading history books and also trying her hand at writing historical plays and doing research.

She received her education at the London County School for Girls, where she studied English literature, history, and art, specializing in English and European medieval history (the main topic was Western monasticism of the 12th century). She then continued her studies at the North West Polytechnic in London, where she furthered her study of history as her main subject, studying world history, English medieval history, and the Italian Renaissance. She planned to become a history teacher, but gave up the idea after becoming disillusioned with “fashionable teaching methods.”

From 1991 to 1997, she worked at a school for children with developmental delays. She also worked as a civil servant and was a homemaker, raising children.

From the late 1990s to 2014, she published a number of popular history books devoted to the Tudor era, the Wars of the Roses, and other historical figures, and also several historical romances — mostly in the form of biographies of members of the British royal families.

Thanks to her books on the Tudor period, the writer became one of the most sought-after and authoritative contemporary female historians in Britain.

She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and a lifetime honorary member of the Society of the Friends of the Royal Palaces. She supports the excavation, reconstruction, and restoration of Northampton Castle in Northampton, believing that it is a site of primary historical importance and that it would be tragic to lose it forever.

In 1972, Alison married Rankin Weir. The couple had two children: a son, John, in 1982,