Elizabeth Fremantle is the award winning author of Disobedient (HWA Gold Crown 2024). Set in seventeenth century Rome, it focuses on a year in the life of the remarkable painter and prodigy Artemisia Gentileschi. Another Rome-set novel, Sinners, publishes in July 2025, about the tragic Italian noblewoman Beatrice Cenci.

Elizabeth’s first novel, Queen’s Gambit was adapted for the screen as Firebrand, starring Alicia Vikander and Jude Law. The film premiered in competition at Cannes Film Festival 2023, screened in cinemas in 2024 and is now streaming on Prime UK. A revised edition of the novel was published under the title Firebrand.

Fremantle is also the author of a quartet of novels set in the late Tudor period with the emphasis on women and power. Under the name E C Fremantle she has written two Stuart set historical thrillers The Poison Bed and The Honey and the Sting. Her work has been translated into fourteen languages.

She has contributed to a number of publications, including, The Sunday Times, Vogue uk, Vogue Paris, Vanity Fair, The Wall Street Journal and The Financial Times. She also mentors aspiring writers.

She lives in London.

‘Fremantle is surely a major new voice in historical fiction.’ The bookseller

Lindsay Powell is a historical detective. He is motivated to uncover and tell the stories of the under-reported personalities and events of history in the belief that they deserve to be told if our knowledge and understanding of the past is to be complete. A historian, researcher and writer by training and vocation, Lindsay has a particular passion for the military history of the Roman Empire. He scours ancient documents, inscriptions, coins and museums for stories, and archaeological, engineering, medical and scientific reports to reveal deeper truths.

He is news editor of Ancient Warfare and has written for Military Heritage and Strategy & Tactics magazines, Pen and Sword Books, Osprey Publishing and UNRV.com. His books include All Things Under the Sun, and the ground breaking biographies Eager for Glory and Germanicus. His latest works, Marcus Agrippa and Combat: Roman Soldier v Germanic Warrior will be published in 2014.

He divides his time between Austin, Texas and Wokingham, England.

I have been fascinated by crime for as long as I can remember, mainly due to watching Edgar Lustgarten on the television at an impressionable age. An early ambition to be a policewoman lasted the five minutes it took me to realise I was six inches too short,  so I began to collect true crime books. After qualifying as a chemist’s dispenser I took a degree in psychology and entered the civil service. Writing was always a hobby and being published was something I never seriously thought would happen, then in 2001 I was commissioned to write a history of chloroform. This was followed by several non-fiction crime history titles, and three biographies. My first novel, a Victorian whodunit The Poisonous Seed featuring lady sleuth Frances Doughty was published in 2011, and the sixth in the series will be out in 2016. A new series the Mina Scarletti mysteries set in Brighton was launched in 2015. I live in Walthamstow but am often to be encountered in libraries

Linda Porter has a D.Phil from the University of York and spent ten years lecturing in New York before returning with her American husband and daughter to England, where she embarked on a complete change of career. For more than twenty years she worked as a senior public relations practitioner in a major telecommunications company.

The attractions of early retirement were too good to miss and she returned to writing historical non-fiction.  Her first book, ‘Mary Tudor: the first queen’, was published by Piatkus (now part of Little Brown) to critical acclaim in 2007.  Her second book, ‘Katherine the Queen: the remarkable life of Katherine Parr’ (Macmillan, 2010) was similarly well-received.

Linda’s third book , (also for Macmillan), ‘Crown of Thistles: the fatal inheritance of Mary Queen of Scots’, about the rivalry between the Tudors and Stewarts and how this family feud shaped the history of Britain, was published in 2013 to great critical acclaim. She regularly reviews for History Today, BBC History and The Literary Review, appears on radio and TV and has spoken in many marvellous homes and palaces throughout England and Scotland.   ‘Royal Renegades: the children of Charles I and the English Civil Wars’ was published in October 2016. Her latest book is ‘Mistresses: sex and scandal at the court of Charles II, published in April 2020.

Lesley Downer is an author, novelist, journalist and occasional broadcaster. She has just finished the fourth in The Shogun Quartet, her quartet of novels set in nineteenth century Japan during the fifteen years when the country was convulsed by civil war and transformed from rule by the shoguns into a society that looked to the west.
The Shogun’s Queen, to be published November 2016, is a prequel, chronologically the first of the four. It begins in 1853 with an event every bit as shocking as if Martians were to invade Earth: the arrival of four monstrous Black Ships spouting smoke and manned by hairy-faced giants – Commodore Perry and his American troops. It’s the true story of Atsu, plucked from obscurity at the age of twenty in a brave attempt to save Japan and sent to the Women’s Palace, where three thousand women live and only one man can enter: the shogun.
The second novel of the quartet, The Last Concubine, was shortlisted for Romantic Novel of the Year 2009 and translated into 30 languages. Lesley has also written two more novels, The Courtesan and the Samurai and The Samurai’s Daughter, and non-fiction, including Geisha: The Remarkable Truth Behind the Fiction and Madame Sadayakko: The Geisha who Seduced the West, the story of the model for Puccini’s Madame Butterfly.
Lesley is also a journalist and travel writer, gives lectures and teaches Creative Writing at City University in London. She writes book reviews for the New York Times Book Review, the Literary Review and the TLS and the occasional feature for the Sunday Times Magazine.

Jenny Barden is an artist-turned-lawyer-turned-writer with a love of history and adventure. A fascination with the Age of Discovery led to extensive travels in the Americas, and much of the inspiration for her first two novels has come from retracing the steps of early adventurers in the New World. She is currently working on a thriller centred in the court of Queen Elizabeth at the time of the Spanish Armada. Jenny has recently moved to West Sussex where she enjoys long country walks with her dog, as well as visiting castles and other places of historic interest.