We asked members of the Historical Writers’ Association which books were on their Christmas list, and which they were giving to others. The results include some sparkling fiction and non-fiction, from prize-winning novels to hidden gems. Manda Scott Every year something jumps out of the TBR pile and makes itself noticed so that I remember it […]
Debut Crown Opens for Submissions!
The HWA is delighted to announce that the 2017 HWA Debut Crown is open for submissions. The HWA Debut Crown is a literary award for debut historical fiction awarded by the Historical Writers’ Association. It will be awarded to the what is, in the judges’ estimation, the best debut historical novel first published in the […]
The need to fact-check is strangling my creative mind!
Dear Dr Darwin, I know we have to get the facts right, or risk the reader not buying into their side of the contract of fiction, but I do get so fed up with having to fact-check the whole time. When I sit down to write, I have stacks of books and files of images, […]
How do I find imaginative space between what I know of the facts?
Dear Dr Darwin You’ve talked elsewhere about finding the “white space between the facts” on which we can write, and I think I’ve found a time and place – the run-up to Waterloo – which gives me (just about) enough white space for fiction. But I’m finding it very hard to write anything on those […]
A Sideline in Short Stories
I’ve established myself as a novelist, specifically as an author of historical fiction for young adults. But I’ve also published over a dozen short stories, mostly in themed anthologies. I don’t identify myself as a short story writer and don’t actively seek opportunities in that market – but when an editor asks me to make […]
Not What it Used to Be
Taking the helm as our first Historia guest, Livi Michael considers how historical fiction has changed and how we can define it now. In the course of my lifetime, historical fiction has been on a journey, from mass-market romance to literary bestseller. It has absorbed and reflected the key changes of the 20th and 21st centuries […]
Romance or Realism?
As we await the announcement of this year’s Walter Scott prize for historical fiction, Liz Macrae Shaw reflects on Scott’s Scottish legacy and the writers that have followed in his wake. The books we read when we are young mark us like tree rings and become part of our DNA. While I was at primary […]
Hooked on History: Andrew Taylor
Novelist Andrew Taylor explores the childhood favourites that made him the writer he is today. I have a theory that childhood reading maketh the man or woman. A few of the books I read and re-read as a child and young teenager survived the Stalinist purges of later adolescence and young adulthood. These are the books […]