Wladimir Secinski was born to émigré parents in Paris in 1947; lived in the Soviet Union from 1956 to 1972, including a hitch in the Soviet army; and returned to the West in 1972, since which time he has been a journalist and a novelist with a historical bent. He spent much of the 1980s in Afghanistan. He was in Moscow from 1989 to 1995 and now lives in Bulgaria. Currently he is preparing a continuation of the story of the Mongol conquests.