Historical fiction offers more than just entertainment. It brings the past alive for modern readers. Writers can question what we know, speculate, explore new perspectives and redress absences in the historical record. Paul Burke explains. Historical fiction can be fun, a light entertainment, as with any genre. There is nothing wrong with that; but I […]
Rome’s lost exiles
Exile was a very Roman punishment, Fiona Forsyth says. But under Augustus it got personal. Fiona looks at the fate of the lost Romans who lived — and often died — in exile, including members of the Emperor’s own family, and the poet Ovid, subject of her latest novels. When Rome’s first emperor died, there […]
Written in Blood by Fiona Forsyth
Rome’s first emperor, Augustus, is dead. The Empire’s new leader, Tiberius, is vulnerable. As mutinous legions rise and Tiberius struggles to control even his own formidable mother, Livia, the ripples of uncertainty reach even the shores of Tomis on the Black Sea. There, the exiled poet Ovid dares to hope that a new emperor will […]
Death and the Poet by Fiona Forsyth
It’s AD14. When Dokimos the vegetable seller is found bludgeoned to death in the Black Sea town of Tomis, it’s the most exciting thing to have happened in the region for years. Now reluctantly settled into life in exile, the disgraced Roman poet Ovid helps his friend Avitius to investigate the crime, with the evidence […]
Ovid the policeman
The poet Ovid spent some time as one of Rome’s tresviri, the men who supervised activities such as policing. Could he have been involved in solving crimes? For Fiona Forsyth, this is “one of those gaps in history that it is my job as a historical novelist to fill”. Here she writes about how she […]
Poetic Justice by Fiona Forsyth
It’s AD9 and Rome’s celebrated love poet Ovid finds himself in exile, courtesy of an irate Emperor, in the far-flung town of Tomis. Appalled at being banished to a barbarous region at the very edge of the Empire, Ovid soon discovers that he has a far more urgent — and potentially perilous — issue to […]
Historia interviews: Fiona Forsyth and Eleanor Swift-Hook
Fiona Forsyth speaks to fellow author Eleanor Swift-Hook for Historia: After reading The Devil’s Command by chance, I found myself hooked (sorry, Eleanor!) and I have just finished The Physician’s Fate, the latest in the Lord’s Legacy series. I asked its author, Eleanor Swift-Hook, about the series. FF: The mess that is the English Civil […]