Adam Sisman is a writer specialising in biography, who has written the lives of A. J. P. Taylor, Hugh Trevor-Roper and John le Carré. His second book, Boswell's Presumptuous Task, won a National Books Critics Circle award. 'Mr Sisman has an ideal biographical style: inquisitive and open, serious yet not severe,' Dwight Garner wrote in the New York Times, 'I'd read him on anyone.'

Sisman has also edited several volumes of letters, including two volumes of letters of Patrick Leigh Fermor. In 2019 he published a short book about a con man, The Professor and the Parson: A Story of Desire, Deceit and Defrocking. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and an Honorary Professor at the University of St Andrews.