John le Carré (1931, Poole, Dorset) is the most prolific, popular and critically acclaimed British novelist. Since his first novel Call For The Dead in 1961, he has published twenty-three novels and various short stories and been garlanded with success and awards throughout the world, including the Raymond Chandler award at Noir in Festival in 2001.

From the beginning of his work as novelist, le Carré introduced a new kind of espionage, with a protagonist who could be called an antidote to James Bond: an intellectual, introspective, physically unattractive, elderly spymaster named George Smiley, who would feature as a major and minor character in eight novels between 1961 and 1990, including le Carré's breakthrough bestseller in 1963, The Spy Who Came In From The Cold. Smiley is a tormented idealist a despairing romantic, an old-fashioned English gentleman and occasional academic. He is also a ruthless and brilliant espionage maestro whose consistent cuckolding by his wife Anne is his Achilles heel.

In creating Smiley and the morally ambiguous, politically complex world of the British MI5 (the so-called "Circus"), le Carré irrevocably changed the fictional depiction of espionage, bringing an authenticity, seedy veracity and grimy believability to the stories and characters he created. He also introduced a whole new  nomenclature for branding and describing the practices of spying that introduced a wealth of new terminology that has passed into our lexicon of espionage vocabulary (lamplighters, spooks etc).

From very early in his writing career, the popularization of le Carré's radical reengineering of fictional espionage was aided immeasurably by its regular adaptation into the movies. This started  with Martin Ritt's brilliantly gritty film version of The Spy Who Came in From the Cold which, filmed in 1964 and released in 1965, soon celebrates its 50th anniversary, and Noir in Festival is joining in. Although Smiley is relegated to only a few scenes in this film, he is established as a key element in the le Carré universe. First played by British actor Rupert Davies, Smiley would later be impersonated by James Mason, Alec Guinness and Gary Oldman.