Eric Lomax

Eric Sutherland Lomax (30 May 1919 – 8 October 2012) was a British Army officer who was sent to a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp in 1942. He is most notable for his book, The Railway Man, about his experiences before, during, and after World War II, which won the 1996 NCR Book Award and the PEN/Ackerley Prize. Lomax's autobiography The Railway Man was published in 1995. John McCarthy, a journalist who was held hostage for five years in Lebanon, described Lomax's book as "an extraordinary story of torture and reconciliation."

Lomax's story was made into the BBC television drama Prisoners in Time in 1995, starring John Hurt as Lomax, Randall Duk Kim as Nagase, and Rowena Cooper as Patti.A film adaptation was released in 2013. Directed by Jonathan Teplitzky, the film stars Colin Firth and Jeremy Irvine as the older and younger Eric Lomax respectively, and Nicole Kidman as Patti, the woman who befriended and later married Lomax. The film moves between Lomax's time as a FEPOW on the Burma Railway and his later life around the time of his reconciliation with his captor.