Historia Live Dublin returns on 1 May with four more bestselling authors of historical fiction. The theme is When History Meets Mystery featuring Sinéad Crowley, Amanda Geard and Carmel Harrington. The discussion, led by Hazel Gaynor, will look at novels with dual or multiple timelines and narrators, the skill of creating suspense on the page, the difficulties of weaving a […]
How I discovered my war hero uncle’s secret
Douglas Jackson’s Polish uncle was a bit of a family legend. But it was only while researching his Warsaw Quartet series that Doug discovered that Uncle Kazimierz was a war hero, a secret that he’d kept after the Second World War. The perennial question that eventually faces every writer is: Where do I go next? […]
A writer’s career
This month, the third novel by the bestselling historical action author Griff Hosker to come out in 2024 is published. And it’s only March. Griff has published over 175 novels in all. Intrigued as well as impressed, we asked him to tell us about his career as a writer. I was just 7 years old […]
Review: Mary & George
Who better than a novelist who’s also a historian and the latest biographer of Charles I to review Mary & George, the TV drama based on the life of George, Duke of Buckingham, favourite of James VI and I? We asked Mark Turnbull to watch the series. Many of us ask why the Stuarts are […]
Felo de Se: the gruesome punishment that led to me writing The Low Road
Katharine Quarmby’s investigation into the gruesome burial of a suicide victim — for felo de se — with links to her home town inspired her first novel, The Low Road. For Women’s History Month, she explains why this punishment fell disproportionately onto poor women, and what made her want to tell this story. On a […]
Fiction and the English Civil Wars
Jemahl Evans, author of the Blandford Candy series of novels about a man known as the last Roundhead, surveys 300 years of fiction about the English Civil Wars. The popularity of the English Civil Wars and the wider 17th century as a period for historical fiction novelists has ebbed and flowed over the last 300 […]
Historia Live in April
Historia Live, the HWA’s series of author events showcasing historical fiction and history writing, is back at the Wheatsheaf in London on Tuesday, 16 April, 2024. The theme this month is Bad reputations: fortune-tellers, fraudsters & fallen women. On our panel are Laura Shepherd-Robinson, whose The Square of Sevens is out in paperback on 28 […]
PT Barnum and the Circassian girl
It was a shock for RN Morris to discover that PT Barnum, the famous showman, was a people-trafficker. Yet the facts are well documented. For Historia Roger investigates Barnum’s attempt to buy a ‘beautiful Circassian girl’. One of the things I discovered while researching my novella, The Crimson Child, is that PT Barnum, the famous […]