I’ve been taking a break from writing. To begin with, I decided to step back from my day job writing podcast scripts. The plan was, I would spend more time developing my own fiction projects. I mapped out five prospective ideas for new books, and with the help of my agent whittled it down to …
As well as writing historical novels such as Death of a Princess, I also work as a scriptwriter for a number of True Crime and History podcasts. The latest is A Curious History of your Home, which you can listen to on BBC Sounds. I explore the different requirements and challenges of the two types …
Writing historical fiction vs writing history podcasts Read More »
November/December is always a stressful time for any author who’s had a book come out in the preceding year. Everywhere you look, you see books of the year lists, in which your book inevitably doesn’t feature. So it was a truly unexpected surprise to discover that Death of a Princess has been picked by not …
Death of a Princess makes best books of 2024 round-up (twice!) Read More »
Whenever Beryl Bainbridge finished a novel, she would make a painting inspired by the book. It feels like it might have been a way of getting the novel fully out of her system, enabling her to move on to a new project. Although apparently, the real reason was that when she was writing she missed …
I’ve written a couple of articles about the background to my new book, Death of a Princess. The first begins: “In 1879 a group of eleven young people descended on the quiet Russian spa town of Lipetsk, over 700 miles south of St Petersburg. The ten men and one woman stood out from the geriatric …