Royal Blood is a diverse collection of informed and entertaining short stories set in the Tudor period. Read about some of your favourite characters from established series, or be introduced to new writers in the genre. The stories in Royal Blood bring the Tudor era richly to life, presenting suspense, rivalry, espionage and historical drama. […]
Tell Me How It Ends: writing a film noir novel
VB Grey pays homage to the post-war American movies that inspired her novel, Tell Me How It Ends. Tell Me How It Ends is set in London in that moment in 1963 when the 1950s finally gave way to the Swinging Sixties. The young men and women who swept to fame in music, film, photography […]
How I won an award and stopped being an unpublished novelist
Maggie Richell-Davies is the winner of the first HWA/Sharpe Books Unpublished Novel Award. She tells Historia about her now-published novel, The Servant, and her journey to publication by Sharpe Books: “Be persistent,” she advises. “But above all find competitions that put your story under the nose of someone who loves the past.” There was no […]
Historia interview: Nicola Cornick
Nicola Cornick is an international bestselling and award-winning historical novelist who has written more than 30 books over 22 years. She talks to Historia about mixing genres, dual timelines, her love of history and her newest book, out in April. How has your writing changed since your first book, True Colours, was published in 1998? […]
The triumph of Greek myths and the destruction of a civilisation
With the recent publication of several acclaimed novels based on Greek myths, author Hilary Green wonders whether the time is right to look again at the history behind the ancient stories – and maybe for a novel based on the archaeological record. As someone who cut her teeth on the novels of Mary Renault, I […]
This is Not a Book About Charles Darwin by Emma Darwin
Everybody knows about Charles Darwin, and many know about others in his family, from Erasmus Darwin and Tom Wedgwood, the first photographer, to composer Ralph Vaughan Williams and poet and radical John Cornford, the first Briton to be killed in the Spanish Civil War. But when Charles and Emma Darwin’s great-great-granddaughter, another Emma Darwin, tried […]
Responsible Research
Peter Tonkin on the joys and responsibilities of researching historical fiction. Since bringing the 30-novel Mariner series of action adventures to a close and retiring from full-time teaching, I have been working on two parallel series of historical novels. One is a sequence of murder-mysteries set in Elizabethan England and the other is a series […]
Losing the Plot
Robyn Young on her new novel, Court of Wolves, and its difficult path to publication. Over the thirteen years I’ve been in this business, I’ve spoken to many writers about their methods and while no two authors tackle a novel in quite the same way, there’s clearly a spectrum – at the opposite ends of […]