Angus Konstam is an acclaimed historian, one of the world's leading authorities on piracy, past and present and is the author of over sixty books.

He was born in Aberdeen in 1960, but was brought up in the beautiful but remote Orkney Islands, off the north of Scotland.At 18 he joined the Royal Navy on a university scholarship. This gave him an excellent grounding in service life and customs, in seamanship and navigation and in all those little things which a maritime history author needs to know about. It even gave him the chance to sail the waters of the Caribbean - an area he'd write about later. He then studied for a Master's Degree at the University of St. Andrews. In the process he explored the new field of maritime archaeology and wrote his thesis on early naval artillery.

Two decades later this formed the basis for Sovereigns of the Sea, his acclaimed history of Renaissance warships. It also led to a job. In 1985 he was a supervisor on an excavation in the River Thames near the Tower of London, paid for by the Royal Armouries. He ended up staying with the museum for another ten years, becoming a Senior Curator of Weapons. Angus began publishing articles about arms and armour, and this led to his first book.

In 1995 he moved to Key West, Florida to become the Chief Curator in the Mel Fisher Maritime Museum. Mel Fisher was a treasure hunter who found the wreck of the Spanish treasure galleon Nuestra Señora de Atocha off the Florida Keys. His' job was to help turn the place into a bona-fide maritime museum. One way he achieved this was to create travelling exhibits which toured the United States. These included a pirate exhibition, and it was during the research for this that his interest in the subject really took off. He discovered just how little real information was known about pirates, so he decided to find out for himself. So began a quest that turned Angus into one of the world's leading authorities on pirates and piracy!

Konstam returned to Britain in early 2001 and now lives in Edinburgh, where he writes full-time.

The author’s official web site is anguskonstam.com