I trained as an actress at the Rose Bruford College but decided that my time would be better employed as a teacher, so for some years I taught drama and theatre arts. I have a First Class Honours B.Ed. from Liverpool University. Two of my most successful students are Christopher Luscombe, the well known director, and the best 007, Daniel Craig.

History has always been  one of my great interests. I achieved a distinction (equivalent to A*) in my history A Level when I was at school. I have always written and have done scripts for BBC Schools History Programmes in the days when such programmes existed. I had three thrillers published by Robert Hale in the 1980s and won the Historical Novel Society’s Kythira prize for a short story. I was inspired by Mary Renault with a fascination for Ancient Greece and spent several years producing a novel about the fall of Mycenae,  which was admired by a succession of agents and turned down by a succession of publishers, in spite of the fact that Louis de Bernieres pronounced it as ‘as good as Mary Renault’.  I eventually published it myself under the title THE LAST HERO.

When I retired from teaching I was at last able to concentrate on my career as a novelist. I  signed up to do an MA in creative writing at Liverpool John Moores University and graduated in 2000. This really opened doors for me and my first really successful novel was published by Hodder and Stoughton in 2005. WE’LL MEET AGAIN is set in World War ll and tells the story of a Liverpool girl who, through a chance encounter in an air raid shelter, is recruited into SOE, the Special Operations Executive. SOE was set up at the instigation of Winston Churchill to send agents into occupied countries to carry out sabotage and encourage resistance. It was so secret that even the top brass in the army did not know of its existence. This was the beginning of my ongoing interest in its activities, a topic I have revisited in numerous books.

My next novels, also published by Hodder, were a quartet also set in World War ll but inspired by the lives of my own parents. My father was a singer and my mother a dancer and they used to perform together in seaside summer shows. All this came to an end, of course, with the outbreak of war and my father went into the RAF, but I learned later that many of his fellow entertainers followed a different course and used their talents as part of the war effort by entertaining the troops. So the FOLLIES quartet, NOW IS THE HOUR, THEY ALSO SERVE, THEATRE OF WAR and THE FINAL ACT follow the varying experiences of four young people who are all part of the same seaside company at the outbreak of war.

After that I had the experience common to many authors of being dropped by my publisher and having to find a new home.  My researches for the earlier books had introduced me to the FANY, the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry. Originally set up at the end of the 19th century as a corps of mounted nurses who would gallop onto the battle field to tend the wounded, by World War l they transmuted into the first women to drive ambulances under fire. This gave me the ideas for a trilogy of books,  published by Severn House as DAUGHTERS OF WAR, PASSIONS OF WAR AND HARVEST OF WAR .

I returned to World War ll to write OPERATION KINGFISHER, the story of a pair of teenagers trying escape from occupied France, which brought be back to publishers Robert Hale. A visit to Cyprus inspired APHRODITE’S ISLAND, set there at the time of the EOKA campaign to unite the island with Greece and expel the Turks. Then I decided to go back to an earlier interest in Medieval history and wrote TWICE ROYAL LADY, the story of Queen Matilda of England. John Hale greeted this with the complimentary exclamation that ‘this is how history ought to be written’. Sadly, Robert Hale closed down before the book received the promotion it deserved.

The next books were also set in the Middle Ages at the time of the First Crusade. IRONHAND and GOD’S WARRIOR eventually found publication with Sharpe Books.

I was then approached by  Ebury Press, a branch of Penguin Random House, for four novels set in the Victorian era to be published under the pen name Holly Green. These four books are set against the background of the Liverpool workhouse and tell the stories of four children who grew up in its grim environment.  Ebury then republished my World War l stories as the FRONTLINE NURSES trilogy, also under the name of Holly Green.

I returned to the subject of SOE and World War ll for a pair of thrillers, OPERATION LIGHTNING BOLT and OPERATION FORTITUDE, featuring agent Kim Maxwell and published by Joffe Books under my own name. I have just completed a trilogy of novels set in Yugoslavia at the same period and published by Hera Books under the Holly Green pseudonym. These stories gave me the opportunity to update readers on the later adventures of Leo and Sasha, the principal characters in the Frontline Nurses stories. The titles are A CALL TO COURAGE, A CALL TO SERVICE and A CALL TO HOME.

I am currently working on the third Kim Maxwell book.
I am married and live on the Wirral.

He was educated at various schools and universities, including Oxford, where he took his Doctorate in Ancient History at Corpus Christi College. In similar fashion he has taught at various universities including Oxford, where he is now Fellow and Director of Studies in Ancient History at St Benets Hall, and Lecturer in Ancient History at Lincoln College.

His main scholarly research interests are Greek culture under the Roman empire (thinking about the compromises and contradictions involved when an old and sophisticated culture is conquered and ruled by what it considers a younger and less civilised power) and warfare in classical antiquity (looking at how war was both done and thought about by Greeks and Romans). He has published numerous chapters in books, and articles and reviews in scholarly journals becoming an internationally recognised scholar in these fields.

 

Family history (he is half Norwegian) and a passion for the fiction of Bernard Cornwell inspired GILES KRISTIAN to write. Set in the Viking world, his bestselling ‘Raven‘ and ‘The Rise of Sigurd’ trilogies have been acclaimed by his peers, reviewers and readers alike. In The Bleeding Land and Brothers’ Fury, he tells the story of a family torn apart by the English Civil War. He also co-wrote Wilbur Smith’s No.1 bestseller, Golden Lion. His contemporary survival thriller, Where Blood Runs Cold, won the Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing Prize. With his Sunday Times bestseller Lancelot, Giles plunged into the rich waters of the Arthurian legend. His epic reimagining of our greatest island ‘history’ continued in Camelot and draws to a breath-taking close with Arthur.
Giles Kristian lives in Leicestershire.
To find out more, visit www.glieskristian.com. You can follow him on X @GilesKristian and Facebook/Giles Kristian

Emma Darwin grew up in London, with interludes in Manhattan and Brussels, where her lifelong love of Pieter Bruegel the Elder was born; her new novel, The Bruegel Boy, was published in November 2026.

The Times made The Bruegel Boy historical fiction Book of the Month for how it “vividly creates a rich, lost world and dives fearlessly into deep themes”, and the Mail on Sunday applauded it as a “richly imagined exploration of art, belief and brotherhood.”

Emma’s debut novel, The Mathematics of Love, was also acclaimed by The Times as “that rare thing, a book that works on every conceivable level”. It was nominated for many awards including the Commonwealth Writers Best First Book, and the Romantic Novelists’ Association Book of the Year, and has been widely translated.

A Secret Alchemy, Emma’s Sunday Times bestselling second novel, was described by the Daily Mail as “powerful and utterly convincing” and by The Times as “spellbinding”.

Her memoir This is Not a Book About Charles Darwin tells the story of how a creative disaster came from ten generations of creative thinkers in the Darwin-Wedgwood family tree: “Unsparingly honest, thoroughly researched, wise, witting and informative” said the Literary Review.

Get Started in Writing Historical Fiction is published by John Murray Learning in March 2016, as part of their Teach Yourself imprint. Emma’s short fiction has won prizes and been broadcast, and her third novel is in the works.

Emma has taught for Oxford, Goldsmiths and the Open University as well as giving workshops and tutoring and mentoring individual writers. Her PhD in Creative Writing  explored the practice of writing and reading historical fiction. Her Substack This Itch of Writing is linked to by writing teachers, editors and courses around the world around the world.

Elizabeth Buchan began her career as a blurb writer at Penguin Books after graduating from the University of Kent with a double degree in English and History. She moved on to become a fiction editor at Random House before leaving to write full time. Her first novel, Daughters of the Storm was set in the French Revolution, her second, Light of the Moon in the Second World War.  Later novels include the prizewinning Consider the Lily – reviewed in the Independent as ‘a gorgeously well written tale: funny, sad and sophisticated’. A subsequent novel, Revenge of the Middle-Aged Woman was an international bestseller and was made into a CBS Primetime Drama. This was followed by several other novels, including Daughters and I Can’t Begin to Tell You, a story of the SOE operating in Denmark during the Second World War. Subsequent novels include: The New Mrs Clifton, The Museum of Broken Promises and Two Women in Rome. Her latest, Bonjour, Sophie, will be published in April 2024.

Elizabeth Buchan’s short stories are broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and published in magazines. She has reviewed for the Sunday Times, The Times and the Daily Mail. She has chaired the Betty Trask and Desmond Elliot literary prizes, and also been a judge for the Whitbread awards and the 2014 Costa Novel Award. She is a patron of the Guildford Book Festival and co-founder of The Clapham Book Festival.

Elisabeth Gifford grew up in a vicarage in the industrial Midlands. She studied French literature and world religions at Leeds University. She has written articles for The Times and The Independent and has a Diploma in Creative Writing from Oxford OUDCE and an MA in Creative Writing from Royal Holloway College. She is married with three children. They live in Kingston on Thames but spend as much time as possible in the Hebrides.