St Kilda Bird Song by KF MacCarthy won the 2024 HWA Dorothy Dunnett Short Story Competition. Our judges said: “A magical and immersive story of a late 19th-century teacher on the remote island, told from diverse perspectives with fluency and confidence. A very special piece of writing about a remarkable place.” The 2025 Short Story […]
Blitz Kids: celebrating the 80th anniversary of VE Day
On 8 May, 2025, it’s the 80th anniversary of VE Day. To mark the day, Duncan Barrett remembers the stories of the Blitz Kids, told to him by eyewitnesses who, as children, lived through the bombing of Britain’s cities during the Second World War. It’s 2012 and my partner Nuala and I are in the […]
Fashion research for historical novels
Fiona Veitch Smith immerses herself in researching her 1920s and 1930s novels, using period objects and recreating costumes – which she also wears. She tells Historia about her 10 years of historical fashion research and offers some tips for anyone who’d like to try this way of getting a feel for the era they’re writing […]
The War of 1812: unexpectedly relevant
When Tom Williams decided to send his soldier/spy James Burke to North America for his next book, he wondered how European readers would respond to a rather obscure war that took place across the Atlantic while Napoleon was capturing most people’s attention. But as he was writing Burke and the War of 1812, that conflict […]
When fiction is fatal – Byron and vampires
Vampires in Venice? In her new Gothic thriller, Dangerous, Essie Fox imagines what could happen if fiction appears to become fatal fact when Lord Byron is living in the water-bound city. Here she writes about the two incidents from Byron’s life that inspired her novel. Most of us know of Bram Stoker‘s Dracula, published in […]
The real women who made the Greek myths
What can history tell us about the lives of women at the time of the Trojan War? Emily Hauser’s new book examines how recent advances in archaeology and science reveal a surprising amount about the real women who made the Greek myths. ‘Myth’. The very word in English appears to mean something that’s not true […]
The real Doctor Faustus
Anna Legat was delighted to discover that the – or a – real Doctor Faustus was in Kraków at the same time as the fictional hero of her latest novel, A Pact with the Devil, was in the Polish university city. Of course, she had to find out more… Although made of smoke and mirrors, […]
The magic and science of 18th-century Wales
Wales in the 18th century was a land where old magical beliefs and new science met, clashed, mixed and evolved, says Susan Stokes-Chapman, author of The Shadow Key. Her book explores the possibilities of this tension – and is also a “love letter to Wales and the Gothic”. The 18th century was a time of […]