I was born in Birmingham, and feel as though I spent half of my childhood visiting historical sites and scrambling over ruined castles. My first attempts at fiction were short stories I wrote in my teens, mostly science fiction – and then I came to study archaeology at the University of York, and my eyes were opened to the glories of the past as well as the future.

Before long I began work on the earliest versions of a novel set in the closing years of Roman Britain. Many years and many redrafts later, this novel emerged as The Lion and the Lamb.

Over the years fate directed me down the path of academia, first as an MA student and then as a PhD student at the Centre for Medieval Studies in York. Before, during and after my PhD I lived and worked for periods in Ireland, the Netherlands, Germany, Austria and Mexico, and now I’m happily settled as a Lecturer in Medieval History at Durham University.