Charles Nicholl is an English author specializing in works of history, biography, literary detection, and travel.
His subjects have included Christopher Marlowe, Arthur Rimbaud, Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Nashe and William Shakespeare.
In 1972, early in his career, he won the Daily Telegraph''s "Young Writer Award", which gave him tickets to the Caribbean, as a result of which he visited Colombia.
[2] In 1974 he was the winner of the Sunday Times "Young Writer Award" for his account of an LSD "trip" (psychological reaction to a hallucinogen) entitled 'The Ups and The Downs'.
He has since written about such topics as the drug trade (for example in The Fruit Palace) and the Elizabethan underworld (for example in The Reckoning).