L.J. Trafford is the author of three non-fiction books: How To Survive in Ancient Rome, a guide for the discerning visitor to the city in the year 95 CE, Sex and Sexuality in Ancient Rome and Ancient Rome’s Worst Emperors.

She is also the author the Four Emperors’ series of novels. The series comprises four books – Palatine, Galba’s Men, Otho’s Regret and Vitellius’ Feast – which cover the dramatic fall of Nero and the chaotic year of the four emperors that followed.

Palatine received an Editor’s Choice mark from The Historical Novel Society in 2015.

She is a regular contributor to The History Girls blog site and recently appeared on the Channel 5 Series, Emperor: Rise and Fall of a Dynasty.

Hazel Gaynor is an award-winning New York Times, USA Today, Globe and Mail, and Irish Times bestselling historical novelist. Her debut THE GIRL WHO CAME HOME was awarded the 2015 RNA Historical Novel of the Year, and her novels have since been shortlisted for the 2016 and 2020 Irish Book Awards Popular Fiction Book of the Year, the 2019 Historical Writers’ Association Gold Crown Award, and the 2021 Grand Prix du Roman Historique. Her last novel, THE BIRD IN THE BAMBOO CAGE (published in the USA as WHEN WE WERE YOUNG & BRAVE) was a Heatseeker and Publisher’s Weekly bestseller. Her new novel, THE LAST LIFEBOAT, will be published in June 2023.

Hazel’s co-written novels with Heather Webb have all been published to critical acclaim. Last Christmas in Paris won the 2018 Women’s Fiction Writers Association Star Award, and Meet Me in Monaco was shortlisted for the 2020 Romantic Novelists’ Association Historical Novel award. Their latest novel, Three Words for Goodbye, was selected by Prima Magazine as a Best Novel of 2021. Their next novel, Christmas With The Queen, will be published in 2024.

Hazel is published in twenty-seven territories and her books have been translated into twenty languages. Originally from Yorkshire, she now lives in Ireland with her family. To keep up-to-date with Hazel’s work, please visit her website or follow her on social media where you will often find her professionally procrastinating.

Anthony Conway is the author of The Moon Tree, a saga of the 1940s Burma War and the years of conflict in Asia that followed. Drawing on his considerable experience of the Gurkhas and the Far East, he has created an engrossing story in the tradition of James Michener, John Masters, Paul Scott, MM Kaye, and the big historical sagas of Anthony Grey. Spanning several decades, The Moon Tree is a story of love and war that combines “meticulous historical research with a gripping narrative and unforgettable characters.”

He has also written the novels of the Caspasian series published by Hodder & Stoughton, and is currently working on the sixth. Described by the Independent on Sunday as “pure escapist fiction”, each novel is a stand alone story set in the 1920s and 30s, following the adventures of Captain John Caspasian, Indian Army officer and defender of the Empire.

The Black Hand is the opening novel in Jaeger, a spy series set during the Great War in homage to one of Anthony’s heroes, John Buchan.

For younger readers he has written The Case of the Uncomfortable Train Seat, the opening exploits of Teddy Brutus, schoolboy sleuth and antiquarian.

Anthony Conway read English and Philosophy at St David’s University College Lampeter. After training at Sandhurst he was commissioned into 7th Duke of Edinburgh’s Own Gurkha Rifles, remaining with the Brigade of Gurkhas for twelve years. In 1982 he was lifted out of the Borneo jungle where he was attending the Jungle Warfare Instructor’s Course, to sail to the South Atlantic and command his battalion’s Mortar Platoon in the Falklands War. Thereafter he served in other posts both within the Brigade and throughout the wider reaches of the British Army.

After leaving the Army he worked with film Director John Boorman in Ireland, writing his own screenplay The Long March, about China in the  1930s. A second screenplay was Antoine, about the life of another of his heroes, French author and pioneer airman, Antoine de Saint-Exupery.

Anthony was a Director of an export company for many years, working with overseas British and international schools mostly in the Far East.

Throughout his life he has written poetry. Originally from Surrey, he now lives in Cheshire and London.

Anthony Conway is represented by Ian Drury of Sheil Land Associates Ltd, London.

 

Eric Lee was born in New York City, lived most of his adult life on a kibbutz in Israel, and today lives in London. His most recent books are The August Uprising, 1924: The Georgian Anti-Soviet Revolt and the Birth of Democratic Socialism, Night of the Bayonets: The Texel Uprising and Hitler’s Revenge, April-May 1945 and The Experiment: Georgia’s Forgotten Revolution, 1918-21. All three concern the 20th century history of Georgia. He is also the author of three books of military history (Saigon to Jerusalem: Conversations with Israel’s Vietnam Veterans, Operation Basalt: The British Raid on Sark and Hitler’s Commando Order and Britain’s Plot to Kill Hitler: The True Story of Operation Foxley and SOE) and several books about the labour movement and the Internet. His next book is Mole: Stalin and the Okhrana. He is also the founding editor of LabourStart, the news and campaigning website of the international trade union movement.

Sarah Hawkswood read History at St Hugh’s College Oxford, taking Military History and Theory of War as her Special Subject, and has worked in a regimental museum, written educational material for Salisbury Cathedral, catalogued weapons from muskets to missiles, and undertaken research for the Royal Marines Museum. After ’time out’ as a full time mother, she returned to research that culminated in From Trench and Turret – Royal Marines Diaries 1914-1918 under her maiden name, S M Holloway, (Constable  2006). By this time she had begun to write historical fiction, in which creation of a ‘world’ is central, and which tries to stick as close as possible to accurate historical context. She admits that her Bradecote and Catchpoll series is a bit of a cheat, since active ‘investigating’ by Sheriff’s men is far more akin to police work than the twelfth century and ‘hue and cry’.

When not writing the Bradecote & Catchpoll series she writes ‘trad’ Regency novels, but these are biding their time until the genre is publishable again. She likes switching between the two worlds.

After studying English at university Kate’s first job was as an assistant to a London antiques dealer. She then trained to be a journalist and worked in local newspapers and magazines before moving into PR where she worked for a range of charities and not for profit organisations including The National Autistic Society and British Waterways.

Until recently she was communications manager for Britain’s most venerable heritage body, The Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, fondly known as SPAB.

Her most recent book is Fyneshade was published in hardback 2023 by Viper. (Paperback out February 2024). A loving homage to the gothic (and in particular the sub-genre, ‘Governess Gothic’), it is a bridge between Jane Eyre and the Turn of the Screw.

Kate is currently working on two books with co-writer Marcia Hutchinson. The Blackbirds of St Giles is set in the little-known world of the black community in Georgian London and will be published early in 2025 by Simon and Schuster.

Her first book, Kitty Peck and the Music Hall Murders (winner of the 2012 Faber and Faber / Stylist Magazine crime fiction writing competition) was published in July 2013. The sequel, Kitty Peck and the Child of Ill Fortune, was published in July 2015, Kitty Peck and the Daughter of Sorrow, was published July 2017 and the concluding instalment, Kitty Peck and the Parliament of Shadows was published in 2019.

Under the name Cate Cain, she has also published two historical mystery books for children, The Jade Boy and The Moon Child (both published by Templar).

Kitty Peck and the Music Hall Murders was shortlisted for the CWA Endeavour Historical Dagger in 2014. The Jade Boy was shortlisted for The Booktrust’s ‘Book of the Year’ award for readers aged 9-13.

Kate lives in St Albans.