Samuel Hawley has BA and MA degrees in history from Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario and worked in East Asia as a teacher for two decades before becoming a full-time writer. His nonfiction books include The Imjin War, about Japan's 16th-century invasion of Korea and attempted conquest of China, first published in 2005 and reissued in 2014 (Chinese translation forthcoming); Speed Duel: The Inside Story of the Land Speed Record in the Sixties, now being developed by Company Pictures into a TV miniseries; and I Just Ran: Percy Williams, World's Fastest Human, named one of the five "Best Sports Books of 2011" by the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation). Hawley has also written fiction, starting with the novel Bad Elephant Far Stream and continuing with the thriller Homeowner With a Gun, now in development as a feature film. In his latest book, The Fight That Started the Movies. Hawley returns to nonfiction to tell the epic story of how the world's first feature film came to be made.