Sean Lusk’s Final Score won the 2025 HWA Dorothy Dunnett Short Story Competition. It’s with great pleasure that we publish it here in Historia. The competition judges called it: “A brilliantly-crafted and poignant story set in the wake of WWI. The dry, courageous narrator delivers a heart-rending and thought-provoking story of a veteran playing piano […]
How Mary Wortley Montagu and other great 18th-century women were forgotten
Diminished, disparaged, derided. That’s how Sean Lusk describes the fate of Mary Wortley Montagu and other great women of the 18th century. He looks at how they came to be forgotten. I had not intended to write a novel about Mary Wortley Montagu. Her Turkish Embassy Letters were the inspiration for the character of Aunt […]
The strange death of the Levant company (and how a clock taught me about it)
Sean Lusk’s debut novel, The Second Sight of Zachary Cloudesley, was inspired by an 18th-century clock he found in a back alley of Istanbul’s Grand Bazaar. Why would British clockwork be of interest in the Ottoman Empire? So began his interest in the Levant Company, once a powerful force, now hardly remembered. Almost everyone knows […]