Rani Selvarajah’s novel Savage Beasts takes the story of Medea and reimagines it set in 18th-century India. She tells Historia how she wanted to explore the treatment of women and of foreigners under colonialism; universal themes, both in myth and in history. I first studied the play Medea at school and was instantly mesmerised by […]
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Historia interviews: Laura Shepherd-Robinson
Laura Shepherd-Robinson’s acclaimed second novel, Daughters of Night, is shortlisted for the 2022 Goldsboro Books Glass Bell Award. To celebrate this, Historia dragged her away from editing her next book to talk about the award and her writing. Congratulations on being shortlisted! For anyone who hasn’t yet read Daughters of Night, can you sum it […]
Vanity project or lasting legacy – was Hadrian’s Wall worth all the effort?
This year marks 1,900 years since the beginning of the construction of Hadrian’s Wall. We know a lot about how it was built and who built, lived and worked on the wall, Douglas Jackson says. But what we can’t be sure is why it was built. Douglas, author of The Wall, wonders: was it just […]
Unboxing Pandora’s myth – in Georgian London
Susan Stokes-Chapman, author of Pandora, tells Historia why the Regency period is the perfect era for a retelling of a Greek myth – and how she went about unboxing it for her debut novel. As someone whose knowledge of Greek mythology went no farther than one module on the subject at university in 2004, I’m […]
Stealing the secret of silk: the first international industrial spies?
Into the crisis-ridden Eastern Roman Empire of the 6th century two monks arrived with an audacious plan: to steal the secret of silk production from China. Why was this idea so important to Emperor Justinian? Jemahl Evans, author of The Charioteer, unravels what may have been the first recorded case of international industrial espionage in […]
On the trail of an emperor, a rebel, and a lion
To research his latest book, historian Lindsay Powell set out on the trail of the rebel leader who, in AD132, led an uprising of the Jewish people against the Roman Emperor. Who was Bar Kokhba? And what caused the war? For my latest book I wanted to tell the true story of the consequential clash […]
The Charioteer by Jemahl Evans
Constantinople, AD550. The Roman Empire is in crisis with war in Italy and plague ravaging the cities. Emperor Justinian’s reconquest of the west has stalled, and his treasury is bankrupt. Porphyrius the Charioteer, a bitter former slave, is the greatest competitor to ever ride in the Hippodrome, but when he loses his last race an […]
Bar Kokhba by Lindsay Powell
In AD132 the bloody struggle between two strong-willed leaders over who would rule a nation began. One was Hadrian, the cosmopolitan ruler of the vast Roman Empire, then at its zenith, who some regarded as divine; the other was Shim’on, a Jewish military leader in a district of a minor province, who some believed to […]