How much research do I need to do? It’s a familiar question for writers of historical fiction. But author Robert Wilton has a confession…
The HWA and Sharpe Books Unpublished Novel Award: interview with Richard Foreman
Historia talks to Richard Foreman about about the HWA and Sharpe Books Unpublished Novel Award
How I became a historical fiction writer (I think)
Gill Thompson tells Historia how she became a historical fiction author…
much to her surprise
Writing popular history: Three lessons learned
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 […]
What counts as historical fiction?
Our resident agony aunt, Dr Darwin, answers a common question: what counts as historical fiction? Dear Dr Darwin, I told my grandmother that I was writing a historical novel set in the Liverpool of the early Beatles, and she laughed so hard she nearly fell off her motorbike. I told my brother the Beatles weren’t […]
In Search of Mercia
Annie Whitehead on research roadblocks, and writing history when the evidence is elusive. I spend my life writing about the characters who inhabited ancient Mercia. The history of this Anglo-Saxon kingdom is full of colourful characters, some familiar – Lady Godiva and Æthelflæd, Lady of the Mercians – and some not so well-known, but no […]
Why Historical Fiction?
Novelist Andrew Martin considers why he’s drawn to writing historical fiction. I have written fourteen novels, most of them wholly or partly historical. (I say ‘wholly or partly’ because my latest, The Martian Girl, is set both in the modern day and 1898.) I am happy to identify as a historical novelist. It seems a logical […]
The Widow with the Lamp
Liz Macrae Shaw tells how a tragic family tale inspired a novel. The human brain is a story-seeking missile. From early childhood we search out stories, starting with our own personal ones. That’s why programmes about genealogy such as Who Do You Think You Are? have such an appeal and why family history is a […]