John Freely was born in New York and joined the US Navy at the age of seventeen, serving with a commando unit in Burma and China during the last years of World War II. He has lived in New York, Boston, London, Athens and Istanbul and has written over forty travel books and guides, most of them about Greece and Turkey. He is author of The Grand Turk, Storm on Horseback, Children of Achilles, The Cyclades, The Ionian Islands (all I.B.Tauris), Crete, The Western Shores of Turkey, Strolling through Athens, Strolling through Venice (all Tauris Parke Paperbacks) and the bestselling Strolling Through Istanbul. Nicolaus Copernicus gave the world perhaps the most important scientific insight of modern era: the theory that the earth and the other planets revolve around the sun. He was also the first to proclaim that the earth rotates on its axis once every 24 hours. He was a true radical of this time.

This biography would be a natural follow-up to John's books on Islamic and Greek science, because Copernicus wove together the two strands that had threaded their way through the ancient Greek and medieval Islamic worlds, combining the heliocentric theory of the Greek astronomer Aristarchus with the mathematical methods developed by Islamic astronomers, opening the way for the new astronomy and science that emerged in western Europe in the seventeenth century. Most of the books written on Copernicus during the last 50 years have concentrated on his theories; John proposes to write about the enigmatic man.