Jane Johnson is from Cornwall and has worked in the book industry for 30 years, as a bookseller, publisher and writer, author of The Tenth Gift, The Salt Road, The Sultan’s Wife, Pillars of Light and Court of Lions.

She was responsible for publishing the works of JRR Tolkien during the 1980s and 1990s and worked on Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movie trilogy, spending many months in New Zealand with cast and crew. Under the pseudonym of Jude Fisher she wrote three bestselling Visual Companions to the films. She has also written several books for children.

In 2005 she was in Morocco researching the story of a distant family member who was abducted from a Cornish church in 1625 by Barbary pirates and sold into slavery in North Africa (which formed the basis for The Tenth Gift), when a near-fatal climbing incident caused her to rethink her future.

She returned home, gave up her office job in London, sold her flat and shipped the contents to Morocco. In October she married her own ‘Berber pirate’ and now they split their time between Cornwall and a village in the Anti-Atlas Mountains.

She still works, remotely, as Fiction Publishing Director for HarperCollins. Her adult novels include THE TENTH GIFT, THE SALT ROAD and THE SULTAN’S WIFE (all historical novels set in Morocco); COURT OF LIONS (Granada), PILLARS OF LIGHT (Syria). THE SEA GATE and THE WHITE HARE [2022] are both set in my native Cornwall. Her latest novel is THE BLACK CRESCENT, set in 1950s Casablanca during the Moroccan struggle for independence from the French.

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