Owen Parry / Ralph Peters

Ralph Peters is a career soldier, linguist, adventurer and author best known for historical fiction, policy analysis, and political thriller novels. In his career, his travels have taken him from roadblocks in the Caucuses, demonstrations in the Baltics and right across the former Soviet Union. The former American Army military intelligence officer has also written novels about the Civil War under the pen name Owen Perry. Peters asserts that he spent much of his career trying to understand the link between ideologies and actions and this he published in a range of articles, essays, and novels. Ralph Peters grew up in Schuylkill Haven in Pennsylvania and has asserted that given that his training as a writer gained a lot from the German and other European accents common in the area. Growing up in the 1950s and 60s, it was easy to tell where someone came from by their accents since it was not a highly literate culture. However, many of the adults he grew up with were great storytellers and this got him interested in various languages that got him to study German and Russian while he was in the military. This later led to postings and missions in the former Soviet Union and Europe and it is from his experiences that he gets the stories for his novels.