We’re delighted to announce the HWA Crown Awards shortlists for 2024, celebrating the best in historical writing, fiction and non-fiction. There are three awards categories: HWA Gold Crown, HWA Non-fiction Crown, and HWA Debut Crown. Six books are chosen in each category. Here they are, with what our judges say about them: The books shortlisted […]
An epidemic of murder in late Victorian London
When Sarah Bax Horton discovered a police ancestor who worked on the Jack the Ripper investigation, her research led her to write two non-fiction books based on the Metropolitan Police Whitechapel Murders files. Her second book, Arm of Eve, proposes a new prime suspect for the Thames Torso Killer, a serial killer active at the […]
Christian versus pagan: was Charlemagne’s conquest of Saxony the first crusade?
Angus Donald, author of Blood of the Bear, examines Charlemagne’s conquest of Saxony in the late 8th century. It was a campaign not just about territory but about religion: Christian versus pagan. Could it be considered the first ‘crusade’? The First Crusade, historians claim, was launched by Pope Urban II in 1096, after the Pontiff […]
On the Narrow Road to the Deep North by Lesley Chan Downer
After eight years working in Japan, immersing herself in its language and literature, Lesley Chan Downer set off in the footsteps of Matsuo Basho, Japan s most cherished poet, to explore the country’s remote northern provinces. Basho’s pilgrimage to find the landscapes that had inspired the great medieval poets gave birth to Japan’s most famous […]
A Cheesemonger’s Tour de France by Ned Palmer
Charles de Gaulle famously said it was impossible to govern a country with 246 different cheeses. And perhaps he was right. Every French cheese carries an essence of the place where it’s made — its history, identity and landscape. Sometimes that’s a physical thing, as the hard texture of Comté echoes its rugged Alpine home. […]
The Little Book of Hertfordshire by Ruth Herman
Hertfordshire is full of stories. The county’s proximity to London attracts the great, the good and those less so: Hertfordshire was once home to saints such as St Alban, St Thomas More and the only English Pope, Nicholas Breakspear. Such virtuous figures pose a sharp contrast to those involved in the Hertford elections of time […]
The liberation of Naples in 1943 – and its dire consequences
When the Allies liberated Naples in 1943 they though it would be a paradise, Keith Lowe writes. But for the devastated city, there were dire consequences, in part caused by the liberators. Naples is a city of dreams. When the Allies first arrived here at the end of 1943, they came with romantic notions of […]
Naples 1944 by Keith Lowe
This is the story of the first major European city to be liberated by the Allies: what happened to Naples when the scourge of war lashed down upon it, but also, crucially, what happened next. The first major history of wartime Naples to appear in the English language fills a glaring gap in the British […]