Appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire, Bernard Cornwell received formal recognition for a career spent writing historical fiction in English.

Born in London on 23 February 1944, Cornwell attended Monkton Combe School before going on to study at University College London. Over the course of his working life he has been a journalist, a novelist, and a historian, producing his work in English throughout. That range of occupations — journalism, history, fiction — runs through the kind of books he has gone on to write.

His most sustained project has been a long-running series of novels centered on Richard Sharpe, a rifleman whose story plays out across the Napoleonic Wars. Alongside the Sharpe series, Cornwell wrote The Saxon Stories, a sequence of thirteen novels. He has also written a history of the Waterloo campaign, adding a non-fiction account of that episode to his body of work.

The appointment as Officer of the Order of the British Empire stands as one of the more concrete markers of how his output has been received. With the Sharpe series, The Saxon Stories, and the Waterloo history among his completed works, Cornwell's career as a British writer has covered both fiction and documented military history across several distinct periods.