Historia Live in Dublin is back on 2 October, 2024! With Sheila O’Flanagan, Jennifer Ryan and Nicola Cassidy talking about War in Fiction with Hazel Gaynor. Read on to find out more about the authors and how to get your free ticket. Our programme of Historia Live Dublin events continues this autumn with War in […]
How bestsellers through the ages mirrored their times
Gill Paul, herself a bestselling author, looks at how top-selling books mirrored the times they were published in. They weren’t only contemporary, either; historical fiction and fantasy are high on the list, perhaps not surprisingly to those who know the genres. Gill’s latest novel, Scandalous Women, is about the authors of two of these bestsellers. […]
Female sexuality in historical fiction
Lesley McDowell wanted to show all the consequences of women’s sexuality in her novel, Clairmont — the tragic and the happy. There was plenty of both in the Shelley-Godwin-Byron circle that shaped her protagonist Claire Clairmont’s life. And female sexual desire needs to be reflected in historical fiction, Lesley says. In a letter to her […]
Hungary’s vanished village Jews
Jill Culiner investigates why Jews who had survived the Holocaust vanished from a village in Hungary in 1946 and about the centuries of propaganda that led up to a wave of violence in the country. In 2001, while preparing a photographic exhibition about Europe’s vanished Jews, I heard about the pogrom in Kunmadaras, Hungary: in […]
The delights and dilemmas of using real people in historical fiction
“It’s fiction, but there has to be a grounding in truth.” Chris Lloyd, author of the Eddie Giral novels set in Paris in 1940, considers the delights — and the dilemmas — of using real people as characters in historical fiction. One of the biggest dilemmas I feel that historical fiction writers face is whether […]
The window-smashing suffragettes of 1912
Jennifer Godfrey writes about some of the suffragettes involved in the window smashing campaign in 1912, and the careful planning that went into their latest mission. In June and July 1912, 112 years ago, suffragette prisoners were being released from prison having served time for window smashing. Some had completed their full sentence but others […]
Historia giveaway: Banquet of Beggars by Chris Lloyd
Historia is giving away copies of Banquet of Beggars by Chris Lloyd, the third in his Eddie Giral World War Two noir series! Five winners will each get a copy of Chris’s dark and atmospheric novel, set in Occupied Paris in 1940, as well as two exclusive extras: a special Parisian bookmark and a model […]
Crime and politics in the early 18th century
Douglas Skelton found inspiration in the criminals and politics of the early 18th century, a time relatively unexplored in fiction, for his historical crime novels. He explains what it was about the period that drew him to set his Jonas Flint books then. When I began my adventure in historical fiction, following years of writing […]