Contact: Maggie Rowe
maggierowe@tyndale.com
630-784-5333

Carol Stream, Illinois—With 2013 marking the fiftieth anniversary of the death of C. S. Lewis, Tyndale House Publishers is set to publish a definitive biography by Alister McGrath, an internationally known apologist, educator, and bestselling author. C. S. Lewis—A Life will release next March.

“We are honored to be working with Dr. McGrath,” said Ron Beers, senior vice president, group publisher. “Not only is he one of the world’s most respected Christian theologians, he’s also a champion of C. S. Lewis’s importance for Christian apologetics and understands the academic culture within which Lewis developed his ideas. He is ideally placed to write this biography and will introduce Lewis to a new generation of readers who are eager to understand the mind behind the Narnia series and other popular Lewis works.”

Alister McGrath, a former atheist who grew up in Belfast, Northern Ireland, studied at Oxford University, where he became a Christian. McGrath subsequently served as Professor of Historical Theology at Oxford University until 2008, before taking up the newly established Chair of Theology, Religion, and Culture at King’s College London.

Dr. McGrath has a special interest in Christian apologetics. He has debated leading atheists, including Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens. He is the author of numerous notable books, including A Life of John Calvin, Historical Theology: An Introduction to the History of Christian Thought, Knowing Christ, and The Twilight of Atheism: The Rise and Fall of Disbelief in the Modern World.

In C. S. Lewis—A Life, Alister McGrath paints a definitive portrait of Lewis. After thoroughly examining recently published correspondence by Lewis, Dr. McGrath challenges some of the previously held beliefs about the exact timing of Lewis’s shift from atheism to theism and then to Christianity. He offers a portrait of an eccentric thinker who became an inspiring, though reluctant, prophet for our times. McGrath is the only scholar to have conducted a complete, chronological analysis of the entire collection of Lewis’s written documentation.

Tyndale House has planned the March 2013 hardcover release date in advance of the fiftieth anniversary observance of the death of C. S. Lewis, which occurred on November 22, 1963.

Tyndale House Publishers, founded in 1962, is the world’s largest privately held Christian publisher of books, Bibles, and digital media. Tyndale has published many New York Times bestsellers. The largest portion of its profit goes to the nonprofit Tyndale House Foundation, which makes grants to help meet the physical and spiritual needs of people around the world. Tyndale was founded to publish Living Letters, which later comprised part of The Living Bible, a contemporary paraphrase of the Bible that became a global publishing phenomenon. Tyndale now publishes the Holy Bible, New Living Translation (NLT), the translation of choice for millions of people.