Historia is giving away all three winning books in the 2024 HWA Crown Awards to two lucky winners! These awards celebrate the best in recent historical writing, fiction and non-fiction. The two winners of our 2024 HWA Crown Awards winners giveaway will each receive: Disobedient by Elizabeth Fremantle.Our judges called this book “the masterful telling of […]
Show, don’t tell, Write what you know: do they work for historical fiction?
How useful is advice like ‘Show, don’t tell’ and ‘Write what you know’ for authors in general and writers of historical fiction in particular? Jem Poster, who’s an author and an emeritus professor of Creative Writing, takes a closer look. Whatever genre they work in, good fiction writers know better than to give unqualified assent […]
Tiberius: 2,000 years of slander
The historian Lindsay Powell revisits the ancient sources and comes to a different conclusion about Tiberius Caesar, revealing a 2,000-year-old story of slander against Rome’s second emperor. Something strange happens in the mind of a historian while doing research about long dead people. Printed words evoke feelings, photographs morph into flesh, and unfamiliar names take […]
Politics and the Grand Tour: the Jacobite threat
For wealthy young British men in the 18th century, travelling around Europe was not always just about education, culture, and adventure. Politics — sometimes quite dangerous politics involving a threat to the established order in Britain — were a draw as well. Dr Jérémy Filet, author of The Jacobites and the Grand Tour, explains. Art, […]
The women Prince Rupert loved
The two women Prince Rupert loved are thought of — if they’re thought of at all — as his mistresses. But, says Mark Turnbull, they were much more than the bed partners of Rupert the Devil. As the Prince’s biographer, he believes: “Knowing them is knowing him.” Think of the women linked to Prince Rupert […]
The Second World War crime boom
For criminals, 1939 to 1945 were “the golden years”, as a crime boom swept Britain, The blackout and the black market that rationing encouraged were a gift to them. Mark Ellis explains why law-breaking rose by 60 per cent during the Second World War. I am the author of a series of crime thrillers featuring […]
Tito: prisoner, partisan, president
Who was President Tito? A communist dictator who, against all odds, held the former Yugoslavia together, a partisan leader during the Second World War, a charismatic, but vain, man, says Hilary Green. She explains how she became interested in this man, who played such a large part in the history of the Balkan region. Until […]
Famine, clearance and the inspiration for a novel
It was over 50 years ago when Willie Orr found the seed of an idea for a novel about the Scottish potato famine and the Highland Clearances. He had a lot of living to do first, and the inspiration took root in a Scottish archive much later. Now the third of his series about Shiaba […]