Jean is the author of seventeen novels all set in East London where she was born. She also a retired district nurse and university lecturer.

She has published one East London series with Orion featuring pre-NHS district nurses in the post-war years and the introduction of the NHS. She has published a further two series with Atlantic Publishing. One set in the 19th century and her current series features the Brogan family during the dark days of WW2.

She is also a regular writing workshop leader at the Romantic Novelist Association and the Historical Novel Society conferences as well as being the Romantic Novelist Association’s Educational Lead. In addition Jean had undertaken hundreds of speaker’s engagements and workshops with WIs, U3As and on cruise ships.

        

Jason Hewitt is a writer, playwright and actor. He has a Bachelor of Arts degree in History and English, and an MA in Creative Writing. He also has many years’ experience as a bookseller and as a marketing manager in the publishing industry. His debut novel, The Dynamite Room, was longlisted for The Desmond Elliott Prize for New Writing 2014 and the Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award. His second novel, Devastation Road, was longlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction in 2016. He was born in Oxford and now divides his time between Bath and London.

 

James Burge is a maker of factual television programmes and a writer. His latest book, DANTE’S INVENTION, is a narrative biography which explores the life of the poet and how it relates to his great work of fantasy-fiction, the Divine Comedy. It is designed to appeal to those who are not familiar with Dante’s work as much as to those who are.
James’s many films on science and the arts include episodes of Timewatch, and Horizon for the BBC as well, for Channel Four, the acclaimed series about the Industrial Revolution, The Day The World Took Off and Starkey’s Monarchy.  His fascination with the Middle Ages dates from his study of medieval philosophy as a student. It led him to make Strange Landscape, BBC series about  medieval culture, which contained dramatisations of Dante’s journey through Heaven and Hell. He has also dramatised the writings of the eccentric thirteenth-century English friar, Roger Bacon. His previous book, Heloise and Abelard: a twelfth century love story, was published five years ago to outstanding reviews and reasonable sales.

James Aitcheson was born in Wiltshire, England in 1985 and studied History at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, where he developed a special interest in the early Middle Ages and particularly in the Norman Conquest of England.

Sworn Sword is the first novel in the Conquest Series, featuring the knight Tancred and set in England during the tumultuous years that followed the Battle of Hastings in 1066. Tancred’s adventures continue with The Splintered Kingdom and Knights of the Hawk. The Conquest Series is published in the UK, the US, Germany and the Czech Republic.

James’s fourth title, The Harrowing, was published by Heron in 2016 and named by The Times as a Book of the Month. He received his PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Nottingham in 2021. His thesis explored what historical fiction is, how it is constructed, and its objectives, responsibilities and possible future directions.

James teaches Creative Writing at Sheffield Hallam University and the University of Nottingham.

www.jamesaitcheson.com

Having worked on the Restoration navy as an academic historian for 25 years, while harbouring since childhood a hankering to write novels, it took a remarkably long time for the penny to drop and for me to write a story set in the era I had researched so extensively. The upshot was Gentleman Captain, the first of the ‘journals of Matthew Quinton’. Matthew is based on a very real breed, the young men of high birth who were given command of warships by King Charles II despite having virtually no experience of the sea. His adventures are set against the backdrop of the Anglo-Dutch wars, the world of Samuel Pepys, the intrigues and scandals of the Restoration court, and such famous historical events as the Plague and the Great Fire of London.

I also continue to write non-fiction: Pepys’s Navy won the Samuel Pepys prize for 2009, Britannia’s Dragon was nominated for the Mountbatten Literary Award in 2014, and my new book, Kings of the Sea: Charles II, James II and the Royal Navy will be published by Seaforth in the summer of 2017. I’m the Chairman of the Research Committee of the Society for Nautical Research, which awards the annual Anderson Medal for maritime books, Chairman of the Media, Marketing and Membership Committee of the Navy Records Society, and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. I was formerly Chairman of the Naval Dockyards Society and Vice-President of the Navy Records Society. After a long teaching career which culminated in a deputy headship, I now write full time.

I grew up in Darlington, studied Russian and German at Cambridge and now live in London.

I directed for film, TV and radio, including the award winning Numberjacks for Cbeebies, before becoming a full-time author. I was commended in the National Poetry Competition in 2005 and won the Telegraph’s ‘First thousand words of a novel’ competition in 2007 with the opening of Instruments of Darkness, my first novel.

I’ve been shortlisted for the CWA Historical Dagger three times.