Peter Frankopan

Peter Frankopan is Professor of Global History at Oxford University, where he is Director of the Oxford Centre for Byzantine Research and Senior Research Fellow at Worcester College, Oxford. He is also Professor of Silk Roads Studies and a Bye-Fellow at King’s College, Cambridge.

He works on the history and politics of the Mediterranean, Russia, the Middle East, Persia/Iran, Central Asia, China and beyond – as well as on the histories of climate, natural resources and connectivities.

Peter often writes for the international press, including The Sunday Times, New York Times, Financial Times, Guardian, and the Evening Standard.

He has been called ‘the first great historian of the 21st century’ by Brazil’s DCM magazine; ‘the history rock star du jour by The New Statesman, and simply ‘a rock-star historian’  (VLT – Sweden; Helsingin Sanomat – Finland). The Times has called him ‘a literary star.’

Silk Roads was named The Daily Telegraph’s History Book of the Year 2015. it went to Number One in the Sunday Times Non-Fiction charts, remaining in the Top 10 for nine months in a row, as well as being #1 in China, India and many other countries around the world, selling more than 2m copies. It is one of ‘ten books that change how you see the world’ (The Times). It was named one of the ‘Books of the Decade’ 2010-20 by the Sunday Times.

His follow-up, The New Silk Roads, is a ‘masterly-mapping out of anew world order’, according to the Evening Standard, and ‘a brilliant guide to terra incognita’ (Sunday Times) that is reminiscent of Tolstoy (Daily Telegraph). It won the Human Sciences prize of the Carical Foundation in 2019

In his latest book, The Earth Transformed: An Untold History, Peter looks at environmental history, at climate and the ways it has shaped the human and natural past. ‘This is an endlessly fascinating book’, says Gerard DeGroot in The Times, ‘an easy read on an important subject. It has the intellectual weight and dramatic force of a tsunami.’ According to Walter Scheidel in The Financial Times: ‘Humanity has transformed the Earth: Frankopan transforms our understanding of history.’

In December 2018, The Silk Roads was named one of the 25 most influential books translated into Chinese in the last 40 years, alongside One Hundred Years of Solitude, Pride and Prejudice, Catcher in the Rye and The Great Gatsby. In 2019, he won the prestigious Calliope Prize of the German Emigration Center, one of the richest prizes for the Humanities in Germany.

In 2016-18, Peter’s Songlines audio channel in which he chose his favourite pieces of world music was part of British Airways’ In-Flight Entertainment system. In 2018, The Silk Roads was chosen as part of the Government of Pakistan’s Read to Lead program to encourage literacy in the country. It was the inspiration for a new character in The Vikings mini-series. He has collaborated with Katie Melua and students at Oxford to create music based inspired by The Silk Roads.

Peter’s books The Silk Roads: A New History of the World and The New Silk Roads: The Future and Present of the World have been  translated into forty languages.