Robert Wilton (author)

He has spent much of his life in the Balkans, including as an advisor to the prime minister of Kosovo and as a Deputy Ambassador for the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe.

He advised Çeku on international relations, communications and administration, accompanying the Prime Minister as his assistant in the 2007 Troika talks with Serbia.

In 2009, together with a Kosovar friend, they founded The Ideas Partnership, a charity that supports the education and integration of children from marginalised and minority communities, as well as working to protect cultural heritage and the environment.

[3] The Sultan's Emu (2024) is a work of literary fiction drawing on real events in Morocco in 1906, though as much informed by the author's experience of 21st Century colonialism.

Novelist and activist Manda Scott praised its "exceptional writing, truly heart-lifting, heart-breaking characters and landscapes you’ll get lost in for days... It’s beautiful".

In the introduction to The Emperor's Gold, Wilton describes how – following a trail that started with a reference in a book to the occupant of his office a century earlier – he found in the Ministry of Defence archives the records of a department or organisation called the Comptrollerate-General for Scrutiny and Survey.

It draws on two historical mysteries, the theft of the French Crown Jewels from the Garde-Meuble and the discovery of a cache of controversial royal correspondence in the Armoire de fer.

[8] In 2019 Wilton published the first of a new, lighter series of historical novels, again purporting to be based on found documents, in this case the memoir of a dissolute baronet in the period before World War I.