Maria McCann was born in Liverpool and currently lives in Somerset. She is the author of As Meat Loves Salt (Fourth Estate, 2011) an Economist Book of the Year,  The Wilding (Faber, 2010) which was longlisted for the Orange Prize and a Richard and Judy book club choice and  Ace, King, Knave (Faber, 2013).
She has contributed to various anthologies, most recently to Why Willows Weep (October 2011) and Beacons (March 2013)
Maria holds an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Glamorgan. For a decade she designed and delivered Creative Writing courses at Strode College before becoming a Fiction Mentor for the Arvon Foundation.
Maria has served as a judge at the Wells and Frome literary festivals and is a reader for the Annette Green Literary Consultancy.  She is also a qualified writing coach.  From September 2015 she will be Royal Literary Fund Fellow at the University of the West of England.

Margaret Skea is an award-winning novelist and short story writer. Growing up in ‘The Troubles’ in Northern Ireland, much of her writing is concerned with living within conflict, and the pressures that places on families, relationships and on personal integrity.

Her Scottish trilogy, centred on the most notorious feud in Ayrshire’s history is a sweeping tale of compassion and cruelty, treachery and sacrifice; set against the backdrop of feuding clans, the French Wars of Religion and the Great Scottish Witch Hunt of 1597.

The first volume, Turn of the Tide, took the Beryl Bainbridge Award for Best First Time Author; the second A House Divided, was longlisted for the international Historical Novel Society New Novel Award 2016. The third By Sword and Storm, was released in July 2018.

Her most recent awards are for Katharina: Deliverance, a fictionalised biography based on the life of the reformer Martin Luther’s wife, which placed 2nd in the international Historical Novel Society New Novel Award 2018 and the sequel, Katharina Fortitude, which was shortlisted for the BookBrunch Award 2020.

She is passionate about providing an authentic ‘you are there’ experience for readers and relishes the challenge of bringing to life significant, but shadowy historical figures.

An Hawthornden Fellow and award winning short story writer – recent credits include: Neil Gunn, Winchester Short Story, Historical Novel Society Short Story, Mslexia, Fish Short Story and Fish One Page Prize.  Her short stories have been published in a range of magazines and anthologies in Britain and the USA.

 

Margaret Leroy is the author of eight novels.  Her first novel, Trust, was televised as Loving You by Granada TV, starring Niamh Cusack and Douglas Henshall.  The Perfect Mother was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year,  and The Drowning Girl was on the Oprah Summer Reading List. The Soldier’s Wife (first published as The Collaborator) was her first historical novel: it is set in Guernsey during the Occupation of World War II, and was a GoodReads Historical Fiction finalist and a New York Times bestseller. The English Girl, set in 1930’s Vienna, was published in 2014, and A Brief Affair, set in London during the Blitz, was published in February 2016. She is married with two daughters, and lives in Walton-on-Thames.

Margaret George specializes in epic fictional biographies of historical figures, taking pains to make them as factually accurate as possible without compromising the drama.
Her AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF HENRY VIII had its 25th publication anniversary in 2011 and continues to be popular.  ABC-TV based its 1999 Emmy-nominated “Cleopatra” miniseries on her THE MEMOIRS OF CLEOPATRA.
All of her books have been New York Times bestsellers, with twenty-one foreign editions.  Margaret’s father was in the Foreign Service and so she lived overseas for her early life, in such different places as tropical Taiwan, desert Israel, and cold war Berlin, all of which were great training for a novelist to be.  She started writing books about the same time as she could write at all, mainly for her own entertainment.
It was a diversion she never outgrew.  Her published works are: THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF HENRY VIII (1986), MARY QUEEN OF SCOTLAND AND THE ISLES (1992), THE MEMOIRS OF CLEOPATRA (1997), MARY CALLED MAGDALENE (2002), HELEN OF TROY (2006), ELIZABETH I (2011), and an illustrated children’s book, LUCILLE LOST (2006).  Margaret lives in Madison, Wisconsin, and Washington DC, and has a sextagenarian tortoise as a pet.

She is currently at work on a novel about the Emperor Nero, due for publication in late 2017.

Novelist, columnist, screenwriter and political activist Manda (MC) Scott trained as a veterinary surgeon in Glasgow and worked at the Universities of Cambridge and Dublin, specialising in anaesthesia. A brief three year stint as a Director of the computer games company Frontier Developments bridged the gap from veterinary medicine to professional writing.

Her novels have been short listed for an Orange Prize, nominated for an Edgar Award and translated into over twenty languages.  She was a long term columnist for the Glasgow Herald, is a reviewer for the Independent and has contributed to the Telegraph, Times, Daily Express and BBC History Magazine. She has appeared on Time Team as an expert on the Boudican era and on Radios 4 & 5 as a reviewer and commentator. She is the founder and former Chair of the Historical Writers’ Association.

Her early crime thrillers were all set in Scotland, while her move to historical novels took her south for the international best-selling Boudica: Dreaming series and then further afield for the ROME series of ancient world spy thrillers.  Her most recent novel, INTO THE FIRE is a dual timeline thriller featuring Capitaine Inès Picaut of the Orléans police as she investigates the third in a series of fires that are eating her city – an this most recent has eaten a man, too.  As the investigation continues, Picaut comes to understand that the lies and spin of the present are intimately linked with the lies and spin of an ancient past: the life of Jehanne d’Arc, known as the Maid of Orléans: the saviour of France, who was not the vapid mystic peasant of myth – although so many have invested so much in the mythology that they will kill to preserve the fiction.  As her investigation continues, so does that of Tod Rustbeard, adventurer, mercenary and spy, sent into the camp of France’s new military commander, to find the truth of her origins and to use that truth to destroy her. A Sunday Times Book of the Month/Year and ‘a Masterclass in historical writing’, this book breaks genres and sets a new baseline for multi-time line writing.

She is working on a sequel ACCIDENTAL GODS which continues the lives of the survivors of Into the Fire’s contemporary thread with the historical thread set in WW2 – exploring the relationship between with NSA/GCHQ and the SOE/Jedburghs agents of WWII.

She is also working on a television version of INTO THE FIRE, bought by a UK/US consortium and with the contemporary action moved to the US in 2020: what will America look like after four years of Trump/Bannon in the White House and with the next election on the horizon?

She is currently also taking an MA in Economics for Transition (that’s transition to a sustainable economy) at Schumacher College in Devon with particular interests in Universal Basic Income and the use of time in an automated culture – and in regenerative (Carbon negative) farming.

 

 

Maggie Craig writes Scottish historical fiction and non-fiction. Her non-fiction covers the Jacobite women and men of 1745, the Scottish Radical Rising of 1820 and Red Clydeside of the early 20th century. Her novels and family sagas are set in Edinburgh and her home town of Glasgow. She has served two terms on the committee of the Society of Authors in Scotland and is an experienced and popular speaker around Scotland’s libraries and book festivals. She now lives in her mother’s native Aberdeenshire.