Chris (C.C.) Humphreys was born in Toronto and grew up in the UK.  He has acted all over the world and appeared on stages ranging from London’s West End to Hollywood’s Twentieth Century Fox. Favorite roles have included Hamlet, Caleb the Gladiator in NBC’s Biblical-Roman epic mini-series, ‘AD – Anno Domini’ and Jack Absolute in Sheridan’s ‘The Rivals’.

Chris has written nine historical novels. The first, ‘The French Executioner’ told the tale of the man who killed Anne Boleyn, was runner up for the CWA Steel Dagger for Thrillers 2002, and has been optioned for the screen. Its sequel was ‘Blood Ties’. Having played Jack Absolute, he stole the character and has written three books on this ‘007 of the 1770s’ – ‘Jack Absolute’, ‘The Blooding of Jack Absolute’ and ‘Absolute Honour’- short listed for the 2007 Evergreen Prize by the Ontario Library Association. His novel about the real Dracula, ‘Vlad, The Last Confession’ was a bestseller in Canada and his novel, ‘A Place Called Armageddon’ was recently published in Turkish.

In 2012 he wrote, ‘Shakespeare’s Rebel’- about Shakespeare’s fight arranger – and then adapted it into a play of the same title, which premiered at the Bard on the Beach Festival, Vancouver, Canada in July 2015.

All his novels have been published in the UK, Canada, the US and many have been translated in various languages including Russian, Italian, German, Greek, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Serbian, Turkish and Indonesian.

He has also written a trilogy for young adults ‘The Runestone Saga’ – Norse myth, runic magic, time travel and horror. The first book in the series is ‘The Fetch’, the sequel, ‘Vendetta’ and the conclusion is ‘Possession’. They are also published in Russia, Greece, Turkey and Indonesia. His latest Young Adult novel ‘The Hunt of the Unicorn’ was released by Knopf in North America and also published in Spain.

His new adult novel  is ‘Plague’ published by Doubleday in Canada and Century in the UK in 2014. It is the winner of the Arthur Ellis Award for Best Crime Novel in Canada in 2015. ‘Fire’ will be published in 2016. Both are tales of religious fundamentalist serial killers set against the wild events of 1665 to 1666, London.

Chris lives on Salt Spring Island, BC, Canada, with his wife and young son.

Catherine Hokin is a Glasgow-based author, writing fiction inspired by World War Two and the Cold War. She has had eleven books published by Bookouture and Grand Central Publishing in the USA since 2020, all of which are partly or wholly based in Berlin and are available as e-books, audiobooks and paperbacks.

 The Fortunate Ones, is a story of love and survival set in Berlin and Buenos Aires. Felix and Hannah meet unexpectedly in a Berlin dance hall. They are instantly smitten and immediately separated. Felix goes searching for the beautiful girl in blue but ‘Hannah’ is not who she seems and, when they encounter each other again, it is in the most terrible of circumstances.

What Only We Know – traces the devastating impact of a family secret, with a timeline split between the 1930s/1940s and the 1970s to the fall of the Berlin Wall.

The Lost Mother  moves from the German film industry under Goebbels to 1950s Hollywood and covers the rarely explored story of the rise of the German American Bund in America and the internment of American Germans.

The Secretary returns to a divided Berlin, contrasting the story of a grandmother who lives a double life working for the Nazis and using the knowledge she gains in Himmler’s office to rescue the Jewish Berliners at risk from them and a granddaughter who falls foul of the Stasi.

The Hanni Winter series which is set in Berlin and Eastern Europe between 1933 and 1963 and features a photographer and a detective solving crimes, including a number which relate to Hanni’s father. In order the series comprises The Commandant’s Daughter, The Pilot’s Girl, The Girl in the Photo and Her Last Promise.

The German Child is a dual timeline novel set in WW2 Poland and 1990s Washington which examines the true nature and the legacy of the Lebensborn programme, and the beginning of the hunt for ex-Nazis living hidden lives in the USA.

The Secret Hotel in Berlin  This is also a dual timeline novel, which focuses on the fortunes of a grand hotel between the 1930s and 1990s, the secret acts of resistance carried out there in WW2 and a story which has been told so often, it becomes the truth.

The Train That Took You Away Set in Berlin during and after WW2, this is the story of a lost child , a hidden painting and two women from very different worlds trying to mend their broken hearts

 

 

Deborah Swift is the English author of eighteen historical novels, including Millennium Award winner Past Encounters, and The Lady’s Slipper, shortlisted for the Impress Prize.

Her most recent books are the Renaissance trilogy based around the life of the poisoner Giulia Tofana, The Poison Keeper and its sequels. Recently she has completed a secret agent series set in WW2, the first in the series being The Silk Code.

Deborah used to work as a set and costume designer for theatre and TV and enjoys the research aspect of creating historical fiction, something she loved doing as a scenographer. She likes to write about extraordinary characters set against the background of real historical events. Deborah lives in North Lancashire on the edge of the Lake District, an area made famous by the Romantic Poets such as Wordsworth and Coleridge.

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Deborah is represented by Mark Gottlieb at Trident Media Group

Having spent her twenties in London, first at Queen Mary University and then working  selling books on Oxford Street and then at New Scotland Yard, Sally Zigmond moved to North Yorkshire. She now lives in the middle of The North York Moors, to where she moved from Harrogate where much of her novel, Hope Against Hope, is set. She has written fiction for eleven years, having publishing many short stories, both commercial and ‘literary’ and a novella: Chasing Angels. For several years she was commissioning editor for QWF, the literary short fiction magazine for women and was an early overall editor of The Historical Novels Review and later one of team of editors. She still keeps her hand in writing the occasional review for the HNR and entering short story competitions and writing the occasional article for any writing magazine or website who asks nicely! One of these days, she will again be a published novelist. Hope against Hope is proving to be her motto.

Edoardo Albert is a Sinhala/Italo/Tamil writer specialising in Anglo-Saxon and Islamic history. He suspects there isn’t another. (The surname? From the Sri Lankan half of the family, via an attempt to ingratiate ourselves with the colonial masters in the Victorian era.)

Reading his writing once reduced a friend to helpless, rolling-on-the-floor, holding-his-stomach laughter. Unfortunately, the friend was reading the draft of Edoardo’s proposed lonely-hearts ad. He might have given up writing there and then, if not for no less a writer than Bernard Cornwell lavishing praise (‘a splendid novel’) on his first book.

Edoardo’s interest in the Kingdom of Northumbria was provoked by his brother-in-law’s excavations in and around Bamburgh Castle. A confirmed Londoner, he’d seldom been north of Watford before. Now he is happy to confirm that the world does not, in fact, end somewhere around Junction 10 of the M1.

His latest book, Warrior: a life of war in Anglo-Saxon Britain, was published by Granta in October 2019.

Jean Briggs taught English for many years in schools in Cheshire, Hong Kong and Lancashire. She now lives in a cottage in Cumbria.

The Murder of Patience Brooke, published by The History Press in August 2014, is her first novel, featuring Charles Dickens as a detective. The second in the series, Death at Hungerford Stairs, was published in August 2015.