MJ Porter is the author of many historical novels set predominantly in Sixth to Eleventh-Century England and in Viking Age Denmark. Raised in the shadow of a
building that was believed to house the bones of long-dead Kings of Mercia meant that the author’s writing destiny was set.

MJ Porter also writes twentieth-century murder mysteries set in the 1940s and a novel set at the North Northumberland country estate of Cragside in the 1930s.

MJ Porter’s first non-fiction work is about the tenth-century royal women in Saxon England. Check out MJ’s blog for many posts about historical research undertaken for each book. www.mjporterauthor.blog

Kate Thompson is a journalist, ghostwriter and novelist who has spent the past two decades in the UK mass market and book publishing industry. She has written twelve fiction and non-fiction titles, three of which have reached the Sunday Times bestseller list.

Her debut novel, Secrets of the Singer Girls, became a Sunday Times bestseller when it launched in 2015. Kate’s first non-fiction book, The Stepney Doorstep Society was published by Penguin (Michael Joseph) in August 2018 and reached number one in the history categories on Amazon. Her latest novel, The Little Wartime Library, based on the remarkable true story of Bethnal Green Underground’s shelter library in World War Two, is published by Hodder & Stoughton in February 2022 and in America by Grand Union Publishing in 2023.

She writes regular opinion and social history pieces for the Guardian and the Mail on Sunday and has appeared on ITV News, BBC Radio 2, BBC Radio London and Woman’s Hour.

I’m a biographer and writer of historical non fiction. In 2022, I was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. My latest book, No Country for a Woman: The Adventurous Life of Lady Dorothy Mills, Explorer & Writer (The History Press), is shortlisted for the East Anglian Book Awards 2025 (Biography/Memoir category).

Books to date:

The Voice From the Garden: Pamela Hambro & the Tale of Two Families Before and After the Great War (SilverWood Books 2012, longlisted for the New Angle Prize for Literature 2013)

Duchesses: Living in 21st Century Britain (Blink, 2014)

Princess: The Early Life of Queen Elizabeth II (Lyons Press, an imprint of Rowman & Littlefield, 2018; Lume Books, 2020)

Tangled Souls: Love and Scandal among the Victorian Aristocracy (The History Press, 2022)

No Country for a Woman: The Adventurous Life of Lady Dorothy Mills, Explorer & Writer (The History Press, 2025). Shortlisted for the East Anglian Book Awards 2025.

For Princess and Duchesses I’m represented by literary agent Andrew Lownie.

Other:

I also write features for magazines/newspapers/websites.  Publications include History Today, History Scotland, The London Gazette, Majesty, Country Life, BRITAIN etc.

I am an experienced public speaker and have also presented on radio and appeared on television (‘Our Queen in Wartime’, ITV and PBS, April 2020; ‘Elizabeth: A Life Through the Lens’, Channel 4, July 2023) and in podcasts.

Memberships include the Society of Authors; the Biographers’ Club; BIO; the Law Society of England and Wales (as a former practising solicitor)

 

Lora studied English at the University of Hull before training as an actor at East 15. After working as an actor and director for companies including English Touring Theatre, The Orange Tree and Theatr Clwyd, Lora rediscovered her passion for writing on a course at her local bookshop. She graduated from Royal Holloway, University of London with a Masters in Creative Writing in 2019. Her debut historical novel Daughter of the Shipwreck was published in 2021 and her second, The Widow’s Last Secret, in 2022. She was the winner of the Yeovil Literary Prize in 2024 for her novel, The Experimental Gentlemen.

Neil Daws has been a decent waiter, an average baker and a pretty good printer but most notably a diligent Civil Servant, retiring in 2015 after 30 years, 20 spent in security and counter terrorism. Other short-term jobs taken many years ago include enthusiastic tin-rattler for the Royal National Institute for the Blind, a dog-fearing leaflet distributor and a sticker-on of cork tiles in a hotel foyer.

Enthralled by real life tales of adventure and exploration (Sir Ranulph Fiennes is one of his heroes – although cutting off frostbitten fingers with a hacksaw seems a bit extreme), he became a hiker, skier, lover of travel, history and maps, and is a long-standing Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.

An alumnus of the Curtis Brown Creative writing school, he achieved Highly Commended in the Blue Pencil Agency’s First Novel Award 2019 where he met his agent, Nelle Andrew of Rachel Mills Literary (RML).

He is finally making use of his Open University psychology degree and interest in history to write historical crime featuring serial killers and all manner of unsavoury people.

He has written three novels in the Kember & Hayes historical crime series: A QUIET PLACE TO KILL (2021), A SILENT WAY TO DIE (2022) and A PERFECT TIME TO MURDER (2023).

MURDER AT THE PALACE (2025), a cosy crime set in Hampton Court Palace in 1891, is published by Orion Fiction and will be followed in 2026 by MURDER AT THE TOWER.