Elizabeth Lowry’s first novel, The Bellini Madonna, was published in the UK (Quercus/riverrun 2008, 2009), the USA (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2009) and in Italy as La Madonna del Bellini (2008), and was reissued by Quercus/riverrun in 2019. Her second, Dark Water, appeared in 2018. It was The Times‘s Historical Fiction Book of the Month, The Sunday Times‘s Historical Fiction Critic’s Choice, The Guardian‘s Book of the Day, and was a Times and New Statesman Book of the Year. It was also longlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction in 2019.

Her third novel, The Chosen, was a Times Best Historical Fiction Book of the Year for 2022 and is shortlisted for the 2023 Walter Scott Prize.

Elizabeth is a frequent contributor to The London Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal and other publications. She lives and works in Oxfordshire.

Annie Whitehead is a prize-winning writer, historian, and Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and has written four award-winning novels set in ‘Anglo-Saxon’ Mercia. She has contributed to fiction and nonfiction anthologies and written for various magazines. She has twice been a prize winner in the Mail on Sunday Novel Writing Competition, and won First Prize in the 2012 New Writer Magazine’s Prose and Poetry Competition. She has been a finalist in the Tom Howard Prize for nonfiction and was shortlisted for the Exeter Story Prize and Trisha Ashley Award 2021. She was the winner of the inaugural Historical Writers’ Association (HWA)/Dorothy Dunnett Prize 2017 and was subsequently a judge for that same competition. She has also been a judge for the HNS (Historical Novel Society) Short Story Competition, and was a 2024 judge for the HWA Crown Nonfiction Award and chaired the same panel in 2025. Her nonfiction books are Mercia: The Rise and Fall of a Kingdom (a #1 Amazon Best-seller, published by Amberley books) and Women of Power in Anglo-Saxon England (Pen & Sword Books). In 2023 she contributed to a new history of English monarchs, published by Hodder & Stoughton, and in February 2025 Murder in Anglo-Saxon England: Justice, Wergild, Revenge was published by Amberley Books.

In my non-fiction I write about radicals and nationalists internationally and characters from the English Decadence of the 1890s.

My most recent big book is Decadent Women: Yellow Book Lives, the previously untold story of the women who contributed to the innovative 19th century journal.  It came out late in 2023.

Other books include Women and the Vote: A World History and biographies of Tony Benn, Gandhi and Emmeline Pankhurst.

My first novel, Cafe Europa, came out early in 2023. Cafe Europa sees the coming together on a Greek island of three tribes: north Europeans, Greeks and refugees in a novel about deceit and defiance on the edge of Europe.

Choice of Darkness, released in 2025, is a tale of blighted love and mass murder based on the hunt for the biggest serial killer in nineteenth-century America.  It is the story of Henry Holmes from the point of view of the detective who tracked him down, burdened by a love betrayed.

I studied and taught history at the University of Hull and was awarded a PHD in 1997. I went on to a successful career in heritage and have worked for a range of historic properties and national heritage organisations, including the Heritage Lottery Fund, The National Archives and English Heritage. I am now Chief Executive of the Heritage Education Trust, a charity that encourages children to visit and learn from historic properties through the Sandford Award scheme. I am also joint Chief Curator for Historic Royal Palaces, the charity that manages Hampton Court Palace, the Tower of London, Kensington Palace, Kew Palace, the Banqueting House, Whitehall and Hillsborough Castle.

I often appear on television and radio, and I am a regular contributor to history magazines, notably BBC History. I give talks on my books across the country.