Ian Lancaster Fleming (28 May 1908 – 12 August 1964) was a British author and journalist. Fleming is best remembered for creating the character of James Bond and chronicling Bond's adventures in twelve novels and nine short stories. With over 100 million copies sold worldwide, the Bond novels are in the list of best-selling book series Additionally, Fleming wrote the children's story Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and two non-fiction books.

Ian was born in Mayfair, London, to Valentine Fleming, a Member of Parliament, and his wife Evelyn St. Croix Rose. Ian was the younger brother of travel writer Peter Fleming and the older brother of Michael and Richard Fleming (1910–77). He also had an illegitimate half-sister, the cellist Amaryllis Fleming. He was the grandson of Scottish financier Robert Fleming, who founded the Scottish American Investment Trust and merchant bank Robert Fleming & Co. (since 2000 part of JP Morgan Chase.) He was step-cousin to actor Christopher Lee and actress Dame Celia Johnson was his sister-in-law (wife of his brother Peter), and great-uncle to the composer Alan Fleming-Baird. His nephew Matthew Fleming played cricket for England.

Fleming was educated at Durnford School, a Public School on the Isle of Purbeck, in Dorset, which was next to the estate of the Bond family whose motto is The World Is Not Enough. He also attended Sunningdale School in Berkshire, Eton College and Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. He was Victor Ludorum at Eton two years running, something that had been achieved only once before him. He found Sandhurst to be uncongenial, and after an early departure from there, his mother sent him to study languages on the continent. He first went to a small private establishment in Kitzbühel, Austria, run by the Adlerian disciples Ernan Forbes Dennis and his American wife, the novelist Phyllis Bottome, to improve his German and prepare him for the Foreign Office exams, then to Munich University, and, finally, to the University of Geneva to improve his French. He was unsuccessful in his application to join the Foreign Office, and subsequently worked as a sub-editor and journalist for the Reuters news service, including time in 1933 in Moscow, and then as a stockbroker with Rowe and Pitman, in Bishopsgate.