Anthony Summers — Writing | Biography, Movies & Career

Biography

Anthony Bruce Summers (born 21 December 1942) is an Irish author. He is a Pulitzer Prize Finalist and has written ten non-fiction books. He worked for the BBC in current affairs coverage as a producer and then as an assistant editor of the long-running investigative documentary series Panorama. His first book was published in 1976.

Summers is an Irish citizen who has been working with Robbyn Swan for more than thirty years before she became his co-author and fourth wife. After studying modern languages at Oxford University, he began work in laboring jobs, later progressing to freelance reporting for London newspapers. He later worked at Granada TV's World in Action, the UK's first tabloid public affairs program, and following that he wrote the news for the Swiss Broadcasting Corporation's Overseas Service. Later, he went back to England to BBC's Television News and then the BBC's 24 Hours, a late evening current affairs show that brought viewers international coverage of events.

Summers became the BBC's youngest Producer at 24, travelling worldwide and sending filmed reports from the United States, across Central and Latin America, and the conflicts in Vietnam, the Middle East, and Africa. A main focus, though, was on the momentous events of the 1960s and 1970s in the United States – such as on-the-spot reports, during 1968, on the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and on Robert F. Kennedy's bid for the presidency. He smuggled cameras into the then Soviet Union to obtain the only TV interview with dissident physicist Andrei Sakharov – when he was under house arrest, having just won the 1975 Nobel Peace Prize.

Before moving on from the BBC, Summers became an Assistant Editor of the weekly program Panorama.

Based in Ireland for many years, he has since the mid-'1970s concentrated on investigative non-fiction, sometimes taking four to five years to complete a book.

Summers has written about historical figures including Tsar Nicholas II of Russia, President John F. Kennedy, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, President Richard Nixon, and Admiral Husband Kimmel, who commanded the U.S. fleet at Pearl Harbor. He is author of a major book on the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington. He has also written biographies of celebrities Marilyn Monroe and Frank Sinatra, and investigations of Britain's Profumo Affair and the 2007 disappearance in Portugal of the British child, Madeleine McCann.

Most of Summers' books were developed as TV documentaries. Honeytrap was credited as a source for the John Hurt movie Scandal.

Summers published The File on the Tsar with former BBC colleague, Tom Mangold, in 1976. The book is on the disappearance and presumed execution of Nicholas II, last Tsar of Russia, and his family. In the UK, The Sunday Times said it "demolished the massacre story beyond recovery. There is not a dull page in this book." In the U.S.A., the Los Angeles Times called it "a compelling and impressive work", Cosmopolitan deemed it "sensational...a masterful work of great suspense, meticulously researched". In a comparison that must surely have pleased the authors, The Toronto Sun rated the book's "superlative investigative reporting that makes Woodward and Bernstein seem like beginners." ...

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