About David Lowther

David Lowther — A Voice from the Shadows of War

I was born in the final throes of the Second World War — a “war baby”, as they used to say — just four months before VE Day. Though too young to bear arms, I grew up amongst the echoes of sirens and silence, rubble and rebuilding. That war shaped everything: the world outside my window, the fears of my parents, the films, the books, the long shadows cast across dinner tables.

My interest in the Second World War was kindled early, ignited by a harrowing television documentary called Before Hindsight. It stirred something deep — a compulsion not merely to study the past, but to inhabit it, to walk its blasted roads through fiction and fact alike.

For over four decades I’ve been doing just that. Writing. Researching. Remembering. Whether following Roger Martin through Fleet Street’s fog-bound alleys or bearing witness to the unimaginable horrors at Bergen-Belsen, I’ve sought to give voice to both the celebrated and the forgotten. Heroes who never made the headlines. Women who held the home front. Children who lost everything. Soldiers who saw too much and spoke too little.

I don’t write these books to glorify war. I write them to understand it. To honour its ordinary heroes — and to remind us what’s lost when we forget what they stood for.

I’ve recently returned from Jersey, where I joined the islanders in marking 80 years since the occupying Germans were expelled. But the war didn’t end there. It never truly does, not in the minds of those who lived it — nor in the pages of those who strive to remember it.

This website is home to those memories. The stories. The people. The silence between the gunfire.

Have a read. And remember.