After a career in national newspapers, Rory Clements now lives in a 17th century farmhouse in Norfolk and writes full-time. His historical thrillers featuring intelligencer John Shakespeare have been sold to 11 countries. The first in the series, Martyr, was shortlisted for the CWA John Creasey (New Blood) Dagger 2010. Revenger, the second book, won the CWA Ellis Peters Historical Award 2010 and the third in the series, Prince, is shortlisted for the same award in 2011.

R.N. (Roger) Morris’s latest book is Fortune’s Hand, a novel about Sir Walter Raleigh.

He is also the author of The St. Petersburg Mysteries, a series of novels featuring Porfiry Petrovich, the investigating magistrate from Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Set in nineteenth century Russia, the novels are A Gentle Axe, A Vengeful Longing, A Razor Wrapped in Silk and The Cleansing Flames.

His more recent books are set in London immediately before the outbreak of the First World War and feature the decidedly unconventional sleuth, Detective Inspector Silas Quinn: Summon Up The Blood, The Mannequin House, The Dark Palace, The Red Hand of Fury, The White Feather Killer and The Music Box Enigma.

A Vengeful Longing was shortlisted for the 2008 CWA Duncan Lawrie Dagger for best crime novel, runner-up in New York Magazine’s Culture Awards for 2008 in the best thriller category, and Highly Commended for the CWA Ellis Peters Historical Crime Novel Award 2008. It was also picked out by Crime Squad as one of the top ten crime books of 2008. The Cleansing Flames was shortlisted for the 2011 CWA Ellis Peters Historical Dagger Award.

Besides writing novels, Roger has also collaborated with the composer Ed Hughes on an opera.

Robert Fabbri was born in Geneva in 1961. He was educated at Christ’s Hospital School, Horsham and London University. He worked for twenty-five years as an assistant director in the film and television industries.
Having had his fair share of long, cold nights standing in the rain in muddy fields and unbearably hot days in deserts or stuffy sound stages he decided to start writing.
Being a life-long ancient war-gamer with a collection of over 3,500 hand-painted 25mm lead soldiers and a lover of Roman Historical Fiction the subject matter was obvious.
His first novel, Vespasian: Tribune of Rome, was published in May 2011 by Corvus, the genre imprint of Atlantic. The second book, Rome’s Executioner, will be published in May 2012. With the third book, The False God of Rome, already complete he has just embarked on book four which has a working title of Rome’s Fallen Eagle.
There will be seven books in the series as well as spin-off short stories revolving around Vespasian’s friend Magnus and his crossroads brethren; the first of these, The Crossroads Brotherhood, was published on Kindle on 25th December 2011.

Paul’s love of military history started at an early age. A childhood spent watching films like Waterloo and Zulu whilst reading Sharpe, Flashman and the occasional Commando comic, gave him a desire to know more of the men who fought in the great wars of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. At school, Paul was determined to become an officer in the British army and he succeeded in winning an Army Scholarship. However, Paul chose to give up his boyhood ambition and instead went into the finance industry. Paul stills works in the City, and lives with his wife and three children in Kent.

Patricia Bracewell was born and raised in California, where she taught literature and composition before embarking upon her writing career. Her debut novel, Shadow on the Crown (2013, Penguin U.S., Harper Collins U.K.), is set in 11th century England and grew out of her admiration for a remarkable queen, Emma of Normandy, whose life has been all but buried in the footnotes of recorded history. Her second novel, The Price of Blood (2015, Penguin U.S., Harper Collins U.K.), continues the story of Queen Emma during the Viking invasions of England in the reign of Æthelred the Unready. The Steel Beneath the Silk (2021, Bellastoria Press, U.S. and U.K.) is the final novel in the trilogy, exploring the role that Queen Emma may have played in the Danish conquest of England. Patricia served as Writer-in-Residence at Gladstone’s Library in Wales in 2014, and she returns to Britain as often as possible. She and her Canadian husband have two grown sons and live in Northern California.

Nicola Griffith was born in Leeds, Yorkshire, England. Her first paid work was on an archaeological dig—excavating a Roman villa near Helmsley—when she was 15. At 17 she went to the University of Leeds to study science but dropped out after a few months and moved to Hull, where she fronted a band, Janes Plane. She has studied several martial arts—most recently escrima—and, until her diagnosis with MS in 1993, worked as a women’s self-defence teacher. She has also taught a variety of creative writing workshops and courses at various levels. In 1988 she attended the Clarion Writers Workshop at Michigan State University, where she met fellow writer Kelley Eskridge, and moved to the US in 1989. The couple were married in 1993, though the marriage was not legally recognised. In 1994 Griffith’s immigration case made new law when the State Department declared her an alien of exceptional ability and deemed it to be in the National Interest for her to live and work in the US. She became a dual UK/US citizen in spring of 2013. Later that year, on the 20th anniversary of their original ceremony, she and Eskridge were legally married.

Griffith’s first literary award was a BBC North poetry prize for a piece submitted without her knowledge by a teacher. Her first professionally published story was “Mirrors and Burnstone,” in the UK magazine Interzone (1988). Other notable stories include BSFA Award finalist and Tiptree Honour story “Touching Fire” (1993), Nebula Award nominee “Yaguara” (1995), and Hugo Award and Locus Award finalist “It Takes Two” (2009). Three of her stories were collected in With Her Body (2004).

Griffith’s debut novel Ammonite (1993), “heart-wrenching in its emotional power” (New Statesman and Society), won the James Tiptree Jr. Memorial (now Otherwise) Award, a Lambda Literary Award, and the Premio Italia, and was a finalist for the Locus, Arthur C. Clarke and British SF Association Awards. Slow River (1995), “a powerful prose poem on issues that are already with us” (Locus), won a Nebula Award and another Lambda Award and was a finalist for the Seiun Award. Literary crime novel The Blue Place (1998), “brilliant, a bracing, stylized thriller” (Village Voice), began the Aud Torvingen series—which continued in Stay (2002) and Always (2007)—all of which won awards. (These novels were recently reissued in the US by Picador, and published in the UK for the first time by Canongate.) Hild (2013), “Brilliant—mystical, beautiful and poetic, radiant in its adventures and its reverence” (Los Angeles Times), is an historical novel about Saint Hilda of Whitby, and won the Washington State Book Award for Fiction, was a Tiptree Honour Book, and finalist for the Nebula Award, John W. Campbell Memorial, Lambda Literary, and Bisexual Book Awards. So Lucky (2018), “Brutal, unsparing, full of power and healing” (Seattle Times), is a contemporary thriller of the body and won another Washington State Book Award. Spear (2022), “a queer Arthurian masterpiece for our time” (Los Angeles Times), won the Society of Authors ADCI Literary Prize and a Los Angeles Times Book Prize, was a finalist for the Ursula K Le Guin Prize for Fiction, the World Fantasy Award, the Nebula Award, and a Locus Award, was longlisted for the Historical Writers Association Gold Crown, and was named  to many Best Of Year lists. Her new novel, Menewood (2023), “a masterpiece” (New York Times), is the continuation of the story of Hild of Whitby. A new collection, She Is Here (2026) will be released in January as part of PM Press’s Outspoken Author series.

Griffith wrote a multi-media memoir, And Now We Are Going to Have a Party: Liner Notes to a Writer’s Early Life (2007), another Lambda winner, and edited three award-winning anthologies with Stephen Pagel: Bending the Landscape: Fantasy (1997), Bending the Landscape: Science Fiction (1998), and Bending the Landscape: Horror (2001). Her shorter work, essays, opinions, and reviews have appeared in the New York Times, Guardian, Nature, New Scientist, NPR, Foundation, Los Angeles Book Review, Out, Electric Lit, Literary Hub and others. Other honours and awards include official recognition from King County Council, the Alice B medal, Galactic Suburbia Award, and the Outstanding Mid-Career Novelist prize from the Lambda Literary Foundation, plus travel and research awards from various granting bodies in the US and UK. In 2024 she was inducted into the Museum of Popular Culture’s Science Fiction + Fantasy Hall of Fame, and in 2025 was named by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association as the 41st Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master.

In 2015 Griffith published a statistical survey of bias in the literary prize ecosystem showing that stories about women did not win the most prestigious literary prizes. The data went viral and she was interviewed on four continents. Many others took the work forward, applying the statistical approach to various genres, and the $50,000 Half the World Global Literati Prize was established as a direct result.

Griffith began using a wheelchair in 2016, and in that year founded, and, with Alice Wong, co-hosted #CripLit, a series of Twitter chats for writers with disabilities. In 2017 she earned a PhD from Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge. Her thesis, Norming the Other: Narrative Empathy Via Focalised Heterotopia has been cited numerous times. She serves on several advisory and editorial boards such as the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Journal of Historical Fictions, and Duke University Press’s Practises series, and has served as a board trustee for a variety of nonprofit boards such as the Lambda Literary Foundation and the Multiple Sclerosis Association.

Griffith and Eskridge live in Seattle on the edge of a ravine—but get to the UK every year or two. You can find her at her website, Gemæcce (her research blog), Bluesky, Instagram, Threads, Mastodon, and Facebook.