After a career in public service that included stints as advisor to the Prime Minister of Kosovo in the years leading to independence, Private Secretary to the UK Secretary of State for Defence and head of an international human rights mission in Albania, Robert Wilton is now a full-time writer and translator.

His latest literary fiction, The Sultan's Emu, is a bitter fable of colonialism – and an unravelling of the meaning of story itself. It's set in Morocco in 1906, when the country's future was being decided by the European great powers on the other side of the Mediterranean. The unexpected arrival of a circus – mentioned in the historical record – to perform for the Sultan sets the diplomats jostling to reinforce their influence, and brings chaos and eventually tragedy. The novel explores men's alarmingly similar approaches to imperial diplomacy, to women and to story-telling. More than a century after Joseph Conrad and half a century after Chinua Achebe, it also wrestles with the politics of writing about Africa.

The Sultan's Emu is available through Amazon and elsewhere, along with Robert's series of Edwardian entertainments (including the latest, Bolsheviks at the Ballet) and the Comptrollerate-General immersive historial novels.

Robert Wilton's translations of Albanian literature into English include Albania's first great novel (the 1935 Why?), and more recent fiction exploring the Albanian and Kosovan experience of chaos and war in the 1990s. He's also co-founder of The Ideas Partnership charity, empowering marginalized minority communities in the Balkans. Robert and his partner live mostly in Kosovo.