Welcome to my website
Thank you for visiting my website. My first book "A Moscow Awakening", published in 2022, drew upon my experiences of living in the USSR from 1975/6 as a postgraduate student and as a diplomat in Russia from 2000-04. This was the authentic backdrop to a story based on a ruthless business conspiracy during the Cold War. The novel exploresd themes of truth, guilt, justice and commemoration in Soviet society in the 1970s.
My second book, "The Triangle of Death", is set in the period 1936-9 in British Mandate Palestine. It focuses on the fate of three young British recruits to the Palestine Police Force as it (and the British Army) struggle to contain a violent uprising against controversial British colonial policies facilitating the creation of a national home for the Jewish people as set out in the Balfour Declaration of 1917. What motivated these three very different men to volunteer to serve in the highly contested land of Palestine in the 1930s, what were their experiences and what happened to them? As in the case of my previous novel I have sought to provide an authentic and realistic background to the story based on extensive archival research I undertook in university libraries and museums in London and Oxford.
Richard Fassam-Wright
Richard Fassam-Wright worked for nearly 40 years in the EU and the UN, mainly in areas of foreign and security policy and humanitarian affairs. He was a postgraduate student in the USSR from 1975/6 where he studied Soviet agriculture and he returned to work in Russia from 2000-04 in the European Commission’s office in Moscow. A graduate of Cambridge and Glasgow Universities he was also a visiting fellow at the Weatherhead Centre for International Affairs, Harvard University in 2010/11. Since returning to the UK in 2017, Richard has been engaged in a number of activities including participation in Election Observation Missions, most notably in the Ukraine in 2019. "A Moscow Awakening" is his first book and is dedicated to his wife, Meg, and their children James and Kate.
Richard's second book "The Triangle of Death" is about the fate of three very different British recruits who volunteer to serve in the Palestine Police Force in 1936. They arrive in Palestine just as a violent uprising is launched against British colonial policies in the country. The novel examines their motivations for joining up and how they manage the pressures and dangers of serving a Colonial Administration seeking to implement highly contested policies regarding the future of the land of Palestine including the "The Triangle of Death".
My books
The Triangle of Death
28 Jul 2025
A Moscow Awakening
28 Aug 2022