Tony Bradman on writing historical fiction for children. I first started getting published as a children’s writer in the mid-1980s. My own kids were young at the time, and I was reading lots of picture books and nursery rhymes to them, so it was natural for me to write picture book texts and poetry. My books did […]
Historia Interviews: Antonia Senior
Antonia Senior talks to Elizabeth Fremantle about her new novel The Tyrant’s Shadow. The Tyrant’s Shadow follows on from the events of your previous novel Treason’s Daughter, was it always your intention to write more than one book with these characters? I had intended to write only one book. It was my then editor’s idea […]
All Clio’s Children
Sarah Hawkswood, author of the Bradecote and Catchpoll series, on how being an academic historian influences her fiction. I am an historian, and I am also a writer of historical fiction. Being the former influences how I write as the latter, imposes a ‘morality’, but I do not see it as constricting. I also do not […]
A Place In History
Jane Harlond explores how real places inspire authors. There is a cave in Iceland that I will always remember. It is a place I have never been, but Karen Maitland took me there in Falcons of Fire and Ice and I have never been able to forget it. There is a valley full of butterflies […]
On Writing Agatha Christie
Alison Joseph on bringing a a literary legend to life. Georges Simenon once wrote a playful little volume called Maigret’s Memoirs. It is a witty, insightful piece of work, in which Maigret attempts to put the record straight about what happened when this odd little man called Georges Sim was given permission by the French […]
Historia Interviews: Tom Williams and Paul Fraser Collard
Writers Tom Williams (above right) and Paul Fraser Collard (above left) both write novels set in the nineteenth century, yet both came to the period in very different ways. Here they discuss what first fired their inspiration and what keeps them interested in the period. TOM: I never set out to write historical novels. My […]
What’s in a Name?
Joanna Hickson looks at the naming of characters in historical fiction. Authors who write novels based around medieval royal England often have trouble identifying characters one from another, because the same names crop up time and time again in the family trees of the major dynasties. During the fifteenth century for instance the name Henry […]
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 […]