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.

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