Kenneth Martin Follett (born 5 June 1949) is a Welsh author of thrillers and historical novels who has sold more than 195 million copies of his works.

After writing more best-sellers in the genre in the 1980s, he branched into historical fiction with The Pillars of the Earth (1989), an epic set in medieval England which became his best-known work and the first published in the Kingsbridge series.

[4][5] Barred from watching films and television by his Plymouth Brethren parents, he developed an early interest in reading but remained an indifferent student until he entered his teens.

[4][5] His family moved to London when he was ten years old, and he began applying himself to his studies at Harrow Weald Grammar School and Poole Technical College.

After graduating in 1970, he completed a three-month postgraduate journalism course and began working as a trainee reporter for the South Wales Echo in Cardiff.

[7] Each of Follett's subsequent novels has become a best-seller, ranking high on the New York Times Best Seller list; a number have been adapted for the screen.

Follett returned to the Second World War era with his next two novels, Jackdaws (2001), a thriller about a group of women parachuted into France to destroy a vital telephone exchange – which won the Corine Literature Prize for 2003 – and Hornet Flight (2002), about a daring young Danish couple who escape to Britain from occupied Denmark in a rebuilt Hornet Moth biplane with vital information about German radar.

Follett surprised his readers with his first non-spy thriller, The Pillars of the Earth (1989), a novel about building a cathedral in a small English village during the Anarchy in the 12th century.

The novel was highly successful, received positive reviews and was on The New York Times Best Seller list for eighteen weeks.

It focuses on the destinies of a handful of people as their lives are devastated by the Black Death, the plague that swept Europe from the middle of the 14th century.

Set in the decade around 1000 AD – in the so-called Dark Ages – the story "concerns the gradual creation of the town of Kingsbridge and of the many people – priests, nobles, peasants, the enslaved – who played significant roles".

Set against the backdrop of Napoleonic wars and economic transformation, it follows interconnected characters: a widow coping with her husband’s death in a factory accident, a young woman funding a school for impoverished children, a man inheriting a failing business, and a wealthy industrialist protecting his fortune at all costs.

Amid war and social change, the story examines the human cost of progress and the struggle to rebuild a fractured world.

However, the theme of British politics is nearly absent from the third part Edge of Eternity, which concentrates on the Cold War on the one hand and the US Civil Rights Movement on the other; for example, though the novel continues until 1989, it makes no reference at all to the rise of Margaret Thatcher in 1979.

A video game adaptation titled Ken Follett's The Pillars of the Earth, developed and published by German studio Daedalic Entertainment, was released in three parts from 2017 to 2018.