The magazine of the Historical Writers Association
If the release of a new period drama isn’t accompanied by a debate about its historical accuracy, is it even a period drama?
The bones of Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Favourite are entirely factual – Queen Anne really did have a female ‘favourite’, Sarah Churchill, Lady Marlborough
Forget all those lists of predictions for 2019. What you need is an almanack full of useful information, whether it’s when there will be full moons, the future of international affairs in a cryptic picture, or the answer to last year’s riddle. Martine Bailey, author of historical crime mystery The Almanack, spent a year living by […]
Everything about Les Miserables is built on an epic scale. At around 1500 pages, depending on which edition is making your bookshelf sag, Victor Hugo’s novel (published in 1862) is not only physically enormous, but also it deals with MASSIVE themes: love, obsession, redemption, justice, fate and the nature of good and evil. It’s human […]
Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms: Art, Word, War at the British Library has been hailed as “a once-in-a-generation exhibition“. Edoardo Albert finds that, in this giant treasure-hoard, the brightest jewels are often in the smallest details. Would you give a thousand acres of the best land for a book? Benedict Biscop, founder of the double monastery at Monkwearmouth-Jarrow, did. […]
We’re delighted to publish the winner of the 2018 HWA Dorothy Dunnett Short Story Prize. Nineteen Above Discovery by Jennifer Falkner is a beautifully-crafted, brooding story set in the bleakness of the Klondike in the depths of winter. August 31, 1896. Here, to avoid being poor, we live worse than tramps, turning the earth inside out. Last night […]
Our resident agony aunt, Dr Darwin, answers a common question: How can I find a voice for my historical fiction? Dear Dr Darwin, Writing courses boast they’ll help you to “find your voice”, and “the voice” is the thing that publishers and therefore agents say they are looking for almost above all. But what does […]
2018 has been an exciting year for historical writing, both fiction and non-fiction. With the holidays coming up, Elizabeth Fremantle asked fellow HWA members to choose three outstanding books each to recommend as the year’s highlights (and a few older favourites have popped up as well). We hope this selection inspires you, whether you’re looking […]
Read everything you can. Get to know the place you’re writing about. Know when to stop researching and start writing. Those are three of the lessons I have learned in the last quarter century as a writer of popular history. My first book was an oral history of the Vietnam war based on interviews with […]
