Chris Lloyd won the HWA Gold Crown Award in 2021 for The Unwanted Dead, a tense thriller set in Paris at the start of the Nazi occupation in 1940. Detective Eddie Giral, still traumatised by his experiences during the First World War, is helpless in the face of this menace. There’s one thing he still […]
Historia interviews, 2021 Crown Awards shortlists: Stuart Turton
Stuart Turton, author of The Devil and the Dark Water, talks to Historia for the third in our series of interviews with authors whose books have been shortlisted for HWA Crown Awards. His novel, which is up for the Gold Crown Award, is described by the judges as “Holmes and Watson on a 17th-century Dutch East […]
Historia interviews, 2021 Crown Awards shortlists: Mick Finlay
Mick Finlay talks to Historia for the second in our series of interviews with authors whose books have been shortlisted for HWA Crown Awards. Mick’s novel, Arrowood and the Thames Corpses, follows the investigations of William Arrowood and Norman Barnett, private inquiry agents in London who get the cases – and clients – that aren’t […]
Historia interviews, 2021 Crown Awards shortlists: Ellen Alpsten
In the first of our interviews with authors shortlisted for the 2021 HWA Crown Awards, Historia talks to Ellen Alpsten, whose novel, Tsarina, is in the running for a Debut Crown Award. It retells the ‘ultimate Cinderella’ story of the tumultuous rise of a peasant girl, Marta Helena Skowrońska, who became first the wife of […]
HWA Crowns winners interviews: Toby Green
Toby Green is the 2020 winner of the Historical Writers’ Association Non-Fiction Crown Award for his ground-breaking book, A Fistful of Shells. Many years of detailed research culminated in this fascinating perspective on West Africa and its unique history, as he tells Richard Genet for Historia. I catch up with Toby over Zoom after the […]
HWA Crowns winners interviews: Jane Healey
Jane Healey’s The Animals of Lockwood Manor won the 2020 HWA Debut Crown Award, which celebrates new voices in historical fiction. In this atmospheric gothic tale of family madness, long-buried secrets and hidden desires, a young woman is given the task of safeguarding a natural history collection as it is transported out of London during […]
HWA Crowns winners interviews: Andrew Taylor
Andrew Taylor is a historical crime novelist and won this year’s HWA Gold Crown Award for his book The King’s Evil. The novel is set in the late 17th century and is the third in his James Marwood series. Andrew talks to Historia about his book, the inspiration behind his main character and his favourite […]
Historia interviews, 2020 Crown Awards shortlists: Tim Mohr
Into the grey, authoritarian East Germany of the 1980s the punk movement exploded, challenging the regime and ultimately helping to end it. Tim Mohr’s Burning Down the Haus is a history of the GDR’s punk revolution told by the people at its heart and was shortlisted for the 2020 Non-fiction Crown Award. He tells Historia […]