Renita D’Silva has had fifteen historical fiction novels published. Victory Days for West India Dock Road, the new book in her West India Dock Road WW2 saga series will be published on 1 July. Her short stories have been published in The View from Here, Bartleby Snopes, this zine, Platinum Page, Paragraph Planet, Verve, the Best of the Net anthology, the Arts Council funded Bridges Not Borders anthology of prizewinning stories, among others. They have been nominated for the Pushcart prize, shortlisted for the LoveReading Very Short Story award and The Alpine Fellowship Writing Prize and longlisted for the BBC National Short Story award. Her short story, Put On The Spot, has been selected to be published in the Guilty Secrets CWA Anthology edited by Martin Edwards, to be published by Flame Tree in 2026. Her first psychological thriller, The Neighbours, won the Joffe Books Prize 2023. Her third psychological thriller, Two Perfect Couples, is out now.

Jem Poster is the author of two historical novels, Courting Shadows (Sceptre, 2002; translated into German, Polish and Spanish) and Rifling Paradise (Sceptre, 2006; translated into German). He is co-author, with Sarah Burton, of Eliza Mace (Duckworth, 2024), the first in a series of historical detective mysteries; the second book in the series will be published by Duckworth in 2025. He is also co-author, with Sarah Burton, of a handbook for fiction-writers, The Book You Need to Read to Write the Book You Want to Write (Cambridge University Press, 2022) which contains a substantial section on approaches to historical research in the context of fiction-writing.

 

Sophie’s first book, The Lost Queen, a biography of Catherine of Braganza, was listed as one of the top ten history books of 2024 by the Smithsonian Magazine. Formerly a research fellow, she specialises in social history of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with a big pinch of international politics.

Penny Boxall is an award-winning poet and writer for children whose work draws on her career in museums.

Her first novel for children aged 9-12, Letty and the Mystery of the Golden Thread, is published by Puffin and is Blackwell’s Children’s Book of the Month for February 2025.

Her first poetry collection, Ship of the Line (Eyewear, 2014/Valley Press, 2018), is a cabinet of curiosities, reassembling historical lives from overlooked objects. It won the Edwin Morgan poetry award, Scotland’s largest poetry prize, in 2016. Who Goes There? followed from Valley Press in 2018. Again, historical eccentrics dominated, alongside a developing personal tone and a variety of narrative masks. Her current work, Lights Out, is more inward-searching still, marking a deepening interest in voice. It won awards from the Authors’ Foundation and New Writing North (2019).

Penny’s collaboration with woodblock artist Naoko Matsubara, In Praise of Hands, was published by the Ashmolean. She has held a number of residencies, including a visiting research fellowship in the Creative Arts at Merton College, Oxford, and fellowships at Hawthornden Castle, Chateau de Lavigny and Cove Park. Her poem ‘A Wedding List’ won the 2018 Mslexia/PBS international women’s poetry competition.

After graduating from UEA with an MA in Creative Writing, Penny worked for museums including the Ashmolean, the Royal Collection, the Wordsworth Trust and the Laurence Sterne Trust at Shandy Hall. She has taught on the Poetry MA at Oxford Brookes and for the Poetry School. She has held Royal Literary Fund Fellowships at the Universities of York and Cambridge, and is now an RLF Bridge Fellow.

Jo Romero has loved history for as long as she can remember. She achieved her BA (Hons) History: Medieval and Modern degree at The University of Hull in Yorkshire in 1998. Writing on a number of topics at the blog Love British History, she has over 18,000 followers across her Facebook and Instagram channels and has contributed to online magazines and blogs, including The Historians Magazine and Discover Britain, writing on topics including historical food, medieval women and the Tudors. Jo is passionate about uncovering ‘lost’ or forgotten stories from our history and examining the influence of these people and events on the wider narrative of the age. Jo lives in Reading, Berkshire in the UK. Forgotten Women of the Wars of the Roses was her first history book, published by Pen and Sword Books in February 2024, and her second, Power Couples of the Tudor Era, was published in summer 2025. Power Couples of the Renaissance is published in June 2026.

Carol Cooper was a doctor and journalist before becoming an author, which may explain why all her books have a medical strand. Her third novel, The Girls from Alexandria, is set mainly in Egypt during the 1950s and 1960s. The History of Medicine in Twelve Objects was published by Quarto in October 2024. Carol is now working on a history of the world as seen through a dozen diseases.

Carol has contributed regular columns to publications as different as The Sun and The Lancet. A frequent face at live events and on TV and radio, she also has audiobook narration experience.

Carol lives in Cambridge and is a Fellow of Newnham College.

You can find her on Twitter/X, Instagram, Threads, and her website.