Annie Garthwaite
What can I say? I love 15th century history. No apologies, no excuses. The 100 Years War. The Wars of the Roses. All of that.
It’s not that I’m a big fan of blood and battles. Personally I can do without that sort of thing. No. It’s the women who interest me. How they negotiated their way in the world. How they managed – some of them at least, probably more than you’d think – to wield power and influence at a time when men seemed to hold most of the cards. And how others, simply, didn't.
It started in school if I’m honest, with a history teacher that kept asking me questions that, frankly, weren’t ever on the syllabus. Important questions like, ‘So why do you think she did that?’ or ‘What might have been in her mind when…?’ Or the big one: ‘B
If you like author Annie Garthwaite here is the list of authors you may also like
Buy books on AmazonTotal similar authors (42)
-
Lauren Johnson
Lauren Johnson grew up in Bristol and now lives in London. She studied History at Oxford University, taking a Double First. Her Masters in Medieval Historical Research explored the impact of the Wars of the Roses on noblewomen.
Buy books on Amazon
Lauren's latest book explores daily life in the first year of Henry VIII's reign: SO GREAT A PRINCE, ENGLAND AND THE ACCESSION OF HENRY VIII (Head of Zeus). Dan Jones has called it "a gripping and important work from a very talented new writer."
Lauren’s debut novel THE ARROW OF SHERWOOD (Pen & Sword Fiction) draws on her research experience to root the myth of Robin Hood in the brutal, complex reality of the twelfth century. Professor Nigel Saul described it as "an original modern re-working of the medieval tale, avoi -
Joanne Burn
Joanne Burn was born in Northampton in 1973, and now lives in the Peak District where she works as a writing coach. Her first novel, Petals and Stones, was published in 2018. The Hemlock Cure is her second novel.
Buy books on Amazon -
Anna Mazzola
Anna Mazzola is a writer of historical and Gothic fiction.
Buy books on Amazon
Her bestselling third novel, The Clockwork Girl, set in Paris in 1750, is a Sunday Times Historical Fiction pick for 2022
Her debut novel, The Unseeing, won an Edgar Allan Poe award. Her fourth novel, The House of Whispers, is a ghost story set in Fascist Italy and will be published in April 2023.
Anna also writes legal thrillers under the name Anna Sharpe, the first of which will be published in 2024.
When not writing or tutoring, Anna is a human rights and criminal justice solicitor, working with victims of crime. She lives in South London, with her husband, their two children, a snake and a cat.
She loves to hear from readers, so do get in touch on Goodreads or on social media.
annam -
Caroline Moorehead
Caroline Moorehead is the New York Times bestselling author of Village of Secrets: Defying the Nazis in Vichy France; A Train in Winter: An Extraordinary Story of Women, Friendship, and Resistance in Occupied France; and Human Cargo: A Journey Among Refugees, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. An acclaimed biographer, Moorehead has also written for the New York Review of Books, the Guardian, the Times, and the Independent. She lives in London and Italy.
Buy books on Amazon -
Katie Lumsden
Katie Lumsden read Jane Eyre at the age of thirteen and never looked back. She spent her teenage years devouring nineteenth century literature, reading every Dickens, Brontë, Gaskell, Austen and Hardy novel she could find. She has a degree in English literature and history from the University of Durham and an MA in creative writing from Bath Spa University. Her short stories have been shortlisted for the London Short Story Prize and the Bridport Prize, and have been published in various literary magazines.
Buy books on Amazon
Katie's Youtube channel, Books and Things, has more than 29,000 subscribers. She lives in London and works as an editor.
Her debut novel, The Secrets of Hartwood Hall, was shortlisted for the HWA Debut Crown Award. -
Anne Glenconner
Anne Veronica (Coke) Tennant, LVO, Baroness Glenconner is a daughter of Thomas W.E. Coke, MVO, GOC, 5th Earl of Leicester and Elizabeth Mary (Yorke) Tennant, Countess of Leicester.
Buy books on Amazon
Lady Glenconner served as a maid of honour at the coronation of Elizabeth II in 1953. She was Extra Lady-in-Waiting to Queen Elizabeth II's sister, Princess Margaret, Countess of Snowdon from 1971 until the Princess died in 2002.
In 2019, Lady Glenconner’s memoir was published by Hodder & Stoughton. Speaking on her reason for publishing the book, she said: "I was so fed up with people writing such horrible things about Princess Margaret." -
Clare Hunter
Clare Hunter has sewn since she was a child. She has been a banner-maker, community textile artist and textile curator for over twenty years and established the community enterprise NeedleWorks in Glasgow. She was a finalist of the Aesthetica Creative Writing Award with a story published in its 2017 Annual. She was also a recipient of a Creative Scotland Award in 2016. She lives near Stirling in Scotland. Threads of Life is her first book.
Buy books on Amazon
http://www.sewingmatters.co.uk -
Catherine Fletcher
Catherine Fletcher holds a PhD in history from the University of London. She is the recipient of many awards and fellowships at the British School at Rome and the European University Institute in Florence and takes up a position as a Teaching Fellow in History at the University of London in the Fall. Divorce of Henry VIII is her first book.
Buy books on Amazon -
Jilly Cooper
Dame Jilly Cooper, OBE (born February 21, 1937) was an English author. She started her career as a journalist and wrote numerous works of non-fiction before writing several romance novels, the first of which appeared in 1975. She was most famous for writing the six blockbuster novels the Rutshire Chronicles.
Buy books on Amazon -
Frances Quinn
Welcome to my Goodreads author page! I'm the author of The Smallest Man, my debut novel, which tells the story of Nat Davy, a 'court dwarf' at the time of Charles I and the English Civil War, and That Bonesetter Woman, set around a century later, in Georgian London, and telling the story of Endurance Proudfoot and her sister Lucinda, two women determined to make their way in very different worlds.
Buy books on Amazon
I love hearing from and talking to readers, so if there's anything you'd like to know about me, my writing or my books, do get in touch via Twitter (@franquinn), Instagram (@franquinn21) or my author page on Facebook, Author Frances Quinn -
H.F. Askwith
H.F. Askwith is a British writer of dark fantastical fiction, and A Dark Inheritance is her first novel. She gained a Distinction in her Masters in Creative Writing, and in addition to her writing, H.F. Askwith has a love of puzzles, escape rooms and cyphers, which in turn has influenced her work.
Buy books on Amazon -
Elizabeth Macneal
Elizabeth Macneal was born in Edinburgh and now lives in East London. She is a writer and potter and works from a small studio at the bottom of her garden. She read English Literature at Oxford University, before working in the City for several years. In 2017, she completed the Creative Writing MA at UEA in 2017 where she was awarded the Malcolm Bradbury scholarship.
Buy books on Amazon
The Doll Factory, Elizabeth's debut novel, won the Caledonia Noel Award 2018. It will be published in twenty-eight languages and TV rights have sold to Buccaneer Media. -
Darren McGarvey
Darren McGarvey (born 1984), aka Loki, grew up in Pollok, Glasgow. He is a writer, performer, columnist and former rapper-in-residence at Police Scotland's Violence Reduction Unit. He has presented eight programmes for BBC Scotland exploring the root causes of anti-social behaviour and social deprivation.
Buy books on Amazon -
Pat Barker
Pat Barker is an English writer known for her fiction exploring themes of memory, trauma, and survival. She gained prominence with Union Street (1982), a stark portrayal of working-class women's lives, and later achieved critical acclaim with the Regeneration Trilogy (1991–1995), a series blending history and fiction to examine the psychological impact of World War I. The final book, The Ghost Road (1995), won the Booker Prize. In recent years, she has turned to retelling classical myths from a female perspective, beginning with The Silence of the Girls (2018). Barker's work is widely recognized for its direct and unflinching storytelling.
Buy books on Amazon -
Alison Weir
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name.
Buy books on Amazon
Alison Weir is an English writer of history books for the general public, mostly in the form of biographies about British kings and queens, and of historical fiction. Before becoming an author, Weir worked as a teacher of children with special needs. She received her formal training in history at teacher training college. She currently lives in Surrey, England, with her two children. -
Kate Mosse
Kate Mosse is an international bestselling author with sales of more than five million copies in 42 languages. Her fiction includes the novels Labyrinth (2005), Sepulchre (2007), The Winter Ghosts (2009), and Citadel (2012), as well as an acclaimed collection of short stories, The Mistletoe Bride & Other Haunting Tales (2013). Kate’s new novel, The Taxidermist’s Daughter is out now.
Buy books on Amazon
Kate is the Co-Founder and Chair of the Board of the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction (previously the Orange Prize) and in June 2013, was awarded an OBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours List for services to literature. She lives in Sussex. -
Elizabeth Chadwick
Best selling historical novelist Elizabeth Chadwick won a Betty Trask Award for her first novel The Wild Hunt. She has been shortlisted for the UK's mainstream Best Romantic Novel of the Year Award 4 times and longlisted twice. Her novel The Scarlet Lion about the great William Marshal and his wife Isabelle de Clare, has been selected by Richard Lee, founder of the Historical Novel Society as one of the landmark historical novels of the last ten years.
Buy books on Amazon
When not at her desk, she can be found taking long walks with the dog, baking cakes, reading books (of course!) exploring ruins, listening to various brands of rock and metal music, and occasionally slaving over a steaming cauldron with re-enactment society Regia Anglorum. -
Anne O'Brien
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.
Buy books on Amazon
My home is in the Welsh Marches, although much of my early life was spent in Yorkshire, most recently in the East Riding.Ann O'Brien The Marches is a remote region of England, surrounded by echoes from the past. Hereford is close with its famous Mappa Mundi and chained library.So is Shrewsbury, and also Ludlow with its splendid castle and its connections with our Plantagenet and Tudor kings. With my husband, I live in an eighteenth century timber framed cottage, which itself must have seen much history over two hundred years.
I have always enjoyed the appeal of History.I taught the subject with enthusiasm but it becam -
Lucy Mangan
Lucy Mangan (born 1974) is a British journalist and author. She is a columnist, features writer and TV critic for The Guardian. Her writing style is both feminist and humorous.
Buy books on Amazon
Mangan grew up in Catford, south east London, but both her parents were originally from Lancashire. She studied English at Cambridge University and trained to be a solicitor. After qualifying as a solicitor, she began to work instead in a bookshop and then, in 2003, found a work experience placement at The Guardian.
She continues to work at The Guardian writing a regular column and TV reviews plus occasional features. Her book My Family and other Disasters (2009) is a collection of her newspaper columns. She has also written books about her childhood and her wedding.
Ma -
Natasha Solomons
Natasha Solomons is a writer and the New York Times bestselling author of The Gallery of Vanished Husbands, The House at Tyneford, and Mr. Rosenblum Dreams in English. She lives in Dorset England, with her husband, the writer David Solomons, and their two young children. Song of Hartgrove Hall is her fourth novel.
Buy books on Amazon -
S.J. Parris
Pseudonym for author Stephanie Merritt
Buy books on Amazon
S.J. Parris began reviewing books for national newspapers while she was reading English literature at Queens' College, Cambridge. After graduating, she went on to become Deputy Literary Editor of The Observer in 1999. She continues to work as a feature writer and critic for the Guardian and the Observer and from 2007-2008 she curated and produced the Talks and Debates program on issues in contemporary arts and politics at London's Soho Theatre. She has appeared as a panelist on various Radio Four shows and on BBC2's Newsnight Review, and is a regular chair and presenter at the Hay Festival and the National Theatre. She has been a judge for the Costa Biography Award, the Orange New Writing Award and the -
Benjamin Myers
Benjamin Myers was born in Durham, UK, in 1976.
Buy books on Amazon
He is an award-winning author and journalist whose recent novel Cuddy (2023) won the Goldsmiths Prize.
His first short story collection, Male Tears, was published by Bloomsbury in 2021.
His novel The Offing was published by Bloomsbury in 2019 and is a best-seller in Germany. It was serialised by Radio 4's Book At Bedtime and Radio 2 Book club choice. It is being developed for stage and has been optioned for film.
The non-fiction book Under The Rock, was shortlisted for The Portico Prize For Literature in 2020.
Recipient of the Roger Deakin Award and first published by Bluemoose Books, Myers' novel The Gallows Pole was published to acclaim in 2017 and was winner of the Walter Scott Prize 2018 - the -
Dan Jones
Dan Jones is a historian, broadcaster and award-winning journalist. His books, including The Plantagenets, Magna Carta, The Templars and The Colour of Time, have sold more than one million copies worldwide. He has written and hosted dozens of TV shows including the acclaimed Netflix/Channel 5 series 'Secrets of Great British Castles'. For ten years Dan wrote a weekly column for the London Evening Standard and his writing has also appeared in newspapers and magazines including The Sunday Times, The Daily Telegraph, The Wall Street Journal, Smithsonian, GQ and The Spectator.
Buy books on Amazon -
Elodie Harper
Elodie Harper is a journalist and prize winning short story writer.
Buy books on Amazon
Her story 'Wild Swimming' won the 2016 Bazaar of Bad Dreams short story competition, run by The Guardian and Hodder & Stoughton and judged by Stephen King.
She is currently a reporter and presenter at ITV News Anglia, and before that worked as a producer for Channel 4 News. -
Elizabeth Macneal
Elizabeth Macneal was born in Edinburgh and now lives in East London. She is a writer and potter and works from a small studio at the bottom of her garden. She read English Literature at Oxford University, before working in the City for several years. In 2017, she completed the Creative Writing MA at UEA in 2017 where she was awarded the Malcolm Bradbury scholarship.
Buy books on Amazon
The Doll Factory, Elizabeth's debut novel, won the Caledonia Noel Award 2018. It will be published in twenty-eight languages and TV rights have sold to Buccaneer Media. -
Stacey Halls
Stacey Halls grew up in Rossendale, Lancashire, as the daughter of market traders. She has always been fascinated by the Pendle witches. She studied journalism at the University of Central Lancashire and moved to London aged 21. She was media editor at The Bookseller and books editor at Stylist.co.uk, and has also written for Psychologies, the Independent and Fabulous magazine, where she now works as Deputy Chief Sub Editor. The Familiars is her first novel.
Buy books on Amazon -
Laura Shepherd-Robinson
Laura Shepherd-Robinson was born in Bristol in 1976. She has a BSc in Politics from the University of Bristol and an MSc in Political Theory from the London School of Economics. Laura worked in politics for nearly twenty years before re-entering normal life to complete an MA in Creative Writing at City University. She lives in London with her husband, Adrian.
Buy books on Amazon -
Sophie Haydock
Sophie Haydock is an award-winning author, journalist and curator with a passion for uncovering hidden treasures and shining a light on untold stories, particularly those of women in art.
Buy books on Amazon
Her debut novel, The Flames, brings to life the women who posed for the scandalous Viennese artist Egon Schiele – and the price they paid for their devotion. It won the Impress Prize for New Writers, was longlisted for the Historical Writers’ Association Debut Crown Award, and was named one of The Times’ Best Historical Fiction Books of 2022. Translated into seven languages, its Italian edition, Le Fiamme, won the prestigious Premio Letterario Edoardo Kihlgren in 2024.
Her second novel, Madame Matisse, shines a light on the women who shaped and defined the g -
Katie Lumsden
Katie Lumsden read Jane Eyre at the age of thirteen and never looked back. She spent her teenage years devouring nineteenth century literature, reading every Dickens, Brontë, Gaskell, Austen and Hardy novel she could find. She has a degree in English literature and history from the University of Durham and an MA in creative writing from Bath Spa University. Her short stories have been shortlisted for the London Short Story Prize and the Bridport Prize, and have been published in various literary magazines.
Buy books on Amazon
Katie's Youtube channel, Books and Things, has more than 29,000 subscribers. She lives in London and works as an editor.
Her debut novel, The Secrets of Hartwood Hall, was shortlisted for the HWA Debut Crown Award. -
Blessin Adams
Blessin Adams traded police work investigating today’s crime in the Norfolk Constabulary for academia, tracing the lives and deaths of people in early modern England. Blessin received her doctorate following research in early modern English law and literature at the University of East Anglia. As a fan of true crime she is fascinated by historical stories of murder and justice. She lives in Norfolk with her husband and two dogs, and is a beekeeper in her spare time.
Buy books on Amazon
Blessin's first book, Great and Horrible News, is currently available to order, and she is writing a second book due to be published in 2024.
She has also written a chapter titled 'Notebooks, Play and Legal Education at Middle Temple' in Mapping the Early Modern Inns of Court: Law, -
Lucy Steeds
Lucy Steeds is a novelist and a graduate of the Faber Academy and the London Library Emerging Writers Programme. She has a BA in English Literature and a Masters in World Literatures from the University of Oxford. She has lived in London, Paris, Amsterdam and Singapore.
Buy books on Amazon
The Artist is her first novel.
instagram.com/lucysteeds -
W.C. Ryan
W. C. Ryan is also known as William Ryan, who has won acclaim for his historical crime novels in the Captain Korolev series. The first book, The Holy Thief, was shortlisted for a Crime Writer's Association's New Blood Dagger, a Barry Award, the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award,, and the Theakston's Crime Novel of the Year. The second, The Bloody Meadow, was shortlisted for the Ireland AM Crime Novel of the Year, and the third, The Twelfth Department, was also shortlisted for the Ireland AM Crime Novel of the Year as well as the CWA's Historical Fiction Dagger and was a Guardian Crime Novel of the Year. Hi s books have been published in eighteen countries. William lives in London and teaches creative writing at City University.
Buy books on Amazon
(source: Amazon -
Maureen Waller
Maureen Waller was educated at University College London, where she studied medieval and modern history. She received a master's degree at Queen Mary College, London, in British and European history 1660--1714. After a brief stint at the National Portrait Gallery, she went on to work as an editor at several prestigious London publishing houses. Her first book was the highly acclaimed 1700: Scenes from London Life. She currently lives in London with her husband, who is a journalist and author.
Buy books on Amazon -
Margaret Drabble
Dame Margaret Drabble was born in Sheffield in 1939 and was educated at Newnham College, Cambridge. She is the author of eighteen novels including A Summer Bird-Cage, The Millstone, The Peppered Moth, The Red Queen, The Sea Lady and most recently, the highly acclaimed The Pure Gold Baby. She has also written biographies, screenplays and was the editor of the Oxford Companion to English Literature. She was appointed CBE in 1980, and made DBE in the 2008 Honours list. She was also awarded the 2011 Golden PEN Award for a Lifetime's Distinguished Service to Literature. She is married to the biographer Michael Holroyd.
Buy books on Amazon
Drabble famously has a long-running feud with her novelist sister, A.S. Byatt. The pair seldom see each other, and each does not -
Amrou Al-Kadhi
Amrou Al-Kadhi is the founder of drag troupe Denim and has several TV shows currently in development. Amrou has written an episode for Kumail Nanjiani & Emily V. Gordon’s upcoming series for Apple (US), Little America, as well as for BBC America’s hotly anticipated series, The Watch. Amrou has written and directed four short films and has features in development with Film4, the BFI and BBC films. Their journalism has appeared in the Guardian, the Independent, Gay Times, Attitude, CNN and Little White Lies, among other publications. Unicorn is Amrou’s first book.
Buy books on Amazon -
Yasmin Cordery Khan
Yasmin Cordery Khan is a British historian and novelist, and teaches at the University of Oxford. She is the author of the Great Partition, The Raj at War (also published in the US as India at War) Edgware Road and Overland. She has been long listed for prizes including the Orwell Prize, the Authors' Club of Great Britain First Novel Prize, the PEN Hesell-Tiltman and won the Gladstone Prize for history.
Buy books on Amazon -
Stacey Thomas
Stacey Thomas was born in Paddington, home to Paddington Bear and the Puppet Theatre Barge. She is a writer for Bad Form Review and an alumna of the Curtis Brown Creative novel writing course.
Buy books on Amazon
The Revels is her debut novel.
Find Stacey on Twitter @staceyv_thomas and TikTok and Instagram @staceythomaswrites or sign-up to her mailing list for exclusive behind-the-scenes content: https://linktr.ee/staceyv_thomas -
Donald Macintyre
Donald Macintyre is a British freelance journalist and author. He has worked for a number of leading British newspapers including The Daily Express, The Times, The Daily Telegraph and The Independent. In 2011 he won the Next Century Foundation's Peace Through Media Award.
Buy books on Amazon -
Linda Collins
Linda Collins has a new book out (April, 2021), a poetry collection called Sign Language for the Death of Reason, edited by Lambda shortlister Tania De Rozario. It is published by Math Paper Press who sell it through their online bookstore @booksactually. In New Zealand, the distributor is bayhillbooks.co.nz.
Buy books on Amazon
Linda is doing an MA in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. She already has one MA in Creative Writing, during which she wrote her best-selling memoir, Loss Adjustment. That MA was with the International Institute of Modern Letters (IIML) at Victoria University, New Zealand, 2017. Her creative non-fiction, essays, fiction and poetry have appeared in Turbine, Swamp Living, The Fib Review, The Cordite Poetry Review, Oyster -
John Ashdown-Hill
Louis John Frederick Ashdown-Hill MBE FSA (5 April 1949 – 18 May 2018), commonly known as John Ashdown-Hill, was an independent historian and author of books on late medieval English history with a focus on the House of York and Richard III of England. Ashdown-Hill died 18 May 2018 of motor neurone disease.
Buy books on Amazon -
Helen Ashton
Helen Ashton was the daughter of the Arthur J. Ashton, K.C. Encouraged by her father, the author of a delightful book of legal reminiscences, she wrote three juvenile novels, then her literary work was interrupted by WWI and she took up nursing. In 1916 she began studying medicine, working at Great Ormond Street Hospital until her marriage to Arthur Jordan, a barrister twenty years older than herself, in 1927.
Buy books on Amazon
Over the next thirty years Ashton published 25 novels: Doctor Serocold (1930), her most successful, was about a day in the life of an English country doctor; Bricks and Mortar (1932) is about the life of an architect over forty years; and from 1941-7 she published an excellent quartet of novels about contemporary village life. -
Arlene Naylor Okerlund
Professor Emerita of English, retired after a career of teaching Renaissance literature at San José State University in California. At José State University, she served six years as Dean, College of Humanities and the Arts, and seven years as Academic Vice President. In retirement, she teaches with the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute and continues her research in medieval and Renaissance studies. The author of scholarly articles on Shakespeare, Spenser, Marlowe, Donne, and Dryden, she also writes for popular audiences, including the newsletter of the Peninsula Banjo Band with which she plays tenor banjo.
Buy books on Amazon
http://us.macmillan.com/elizabethofyork