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About Jack

Jack Whyte was born and raised in Scotland, and educated in England and France. He migrated to Canada from the UK, in 1967, as a teacher of High School English, but he only taught for a year before starting to work as a professional singer, musician, actor and entertainer--a career he followed, one way and another and with many variations, for the next twenty years.

In the early 1970s, Whyte researched, wrote, directed and appeared in a one man show based on the life and times of Robert Burns, Scotland's national poet. He toured Canada with the presentation, which he had written to appeal to non-Scots, Canadian audiences, de-mystifying the poet and his works and making them understandable and enjoyable to North Americans. The success of the show led him into writing for CBC National television, and eventually to a career in advertising, where he learned his craft as Head Writer and Creative Director of several advertising agencies before moving to the other side of the client-agency relationship, to act as Corporate Communications Director for a number of public and private companies.

Jack Whyte
Jack Whyte

Whyte's interest in 5th Century history and the 460-year Roman military occupation of Britain springs from his early Classical education in Scotland during the 1950s, and he has pursued his fascination with those times ever since. That interest, allied with an equally fervent preoccupation with the Arthurian legend, led him, in 1978, to a sudden realization of the probable truth underlying the legend's central mystery of the Sword in the Stone. Then, knowing how it had been done, Whyte set out to tell the story, and to establish King Arthur securely in a realistic and feasible historical context. His saga, fleshed out by years of research, continues to unfold to the delight of his large and growing audience. Whyte is married, with five adult children, and lives in British Columbia, Canada.

THE BOOKS

The emphasis today is on Whyte’s new Knights Templar Trilogy, a trio of novels dealing with the rise and fall of the Order of the Knights of the Temple of Solomon. The first of the three, Knights of the Black and White, will see wide publication throughout the English-speaking world beginning in August, 2006, and will be translated into all the major European languages and a number of Asian languages. The second novel, Soldiers of Christ, is scheduled for publication in 2007, and the third, with a working title of The Fall of Baphomet will appear the following year. This trilogy—three stories separated from one another other approximately eighty-five years in each case—is a new departure for Jack Whyte, whose nine previous books comprise a cycle of sequential novels examining the earliest beginnings of the Arthurian legend and offering a non-mystical and feasible explanation of how the original root elements of the legend might originally have come into being.
The first novel in Whyte's original series A Dream of Eagles, was The Skystone, and it was published in Canada, in 1992, by Viking Press, a division of Penguin Group, Canada, Inc., and since that time, the series has been published and widely distributed internationally. The Singing Sword appeared in Canada in 1993, followed by The Eagles' Brood in 1994, The Saxon Shore in 1995, and The Sorcerer (which was published in two 500-page halves) in 1997. All five novels were critically acclaimed and achieved Canadian Best-Seller status on the Toronto Globe & Mail's Top Ten Best Seller list.

Jack Whyte
Jack Whyte

In 1995, Whyte sold the US Rights to the series to Tom Doherty Books, a subsidiary of St. Martin's Press of New York, and the Marketing Division there (Forge in hardcover and Tor in paperback) decided to change the title of the series from "A Dream of Eagles" to "The Camulod Chronicles." The first American edition of The Skystone appeared in hardcover in the USA on February 1, 1996, and won a "starred" review in the January 19th issue of the high-profile Publishers Weekly. The remainder of the series has since been published to strong critical acclaim and verbatim Transcriptions of all of the above-mentioned reviews are reproduced in the "Critics" section of this Site. One novel, The Eagle, the last of the nine-book cycle, is scheduled for publication in hardcover in the United States in February, 2007.
In the meantime, Whyte’s Arthurian books have become national favorites in Italy, where they have been published in five separate and successful editions by Piemme, a major Italian publishing house.
With the concluding scenes of the fifth novel in the original series, The Sorcerer: Metamorphosis, the original story, as Whyte had initially conceived it, came to an end. The Dream of the original Eagles, Caius Britannicus and Publius Varrus, had become a reality with the crowning of the young King whose beliefs and example would shape the future destiny of the people of the island of Britain, and a legend had been born. But of course, the story—the legend—of King Arthur was just beginning at that point. Whyte, originally, had no great interest in retelling that story, since it had been told so many times before, but as his own tale progressed through successive generations, a new reality came into being… An entire generation of readers who demanded to know the full resolution of the classic story, as seen through the eyes of the characters who had enacted the Dream of Eagles. In consequence, and in acknowledgment of the demands of his readers, Whyte penned Uther, a separate, companion novel to the series, explaining and resolving several of the mysteries that had been left unsolved at the conclusion of the third book, The Eagles’ Brood. He then continued, and concluded, the story of Arthur’s reign in a two-book “miniseries” sequel called The Golden Eagle, narrated by Arthur’s closest friend, Clothar the Frank, whom the world would come to know centuries later as Lancelot.