Abraham Kawa is half-Sierra Leonean and half-Greek, and has been a teacher, an academic and a scholar of literature, pop culture and creative writing. Based in Greece, he has had two novels and two short story collections published there along with more fiction and graphic novel scripts in the UK and US market, both work-for-hire and personal projects. His passion is genre stories and classic archetypes, which he loves to write with an eye towards what’s behind the tropes. Whether crime, thriller, or horror, his fiction goes for a poison pen love letter to cliché. His books often reflect his avid love of film, comics, music, and cult movies of the past. He and his wife live in one of the quieter towns of Greece, spending their free time with family and dogs. In life and fiction alike, he tries to go by the words of Atticus Finch and climb inside of a person’s skin and walk around in it to know them. Abraham’s most high-profile work to date is the script for the historical graphic novel Democracy (Bloomsbury, 2015), published in ten countries since.

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You can follow Abraham on X.

Adele Jordan is a writer with a fascination for history. Her focus is fiction in the Tudor era, telling the stories of women and adventure. Whether it's inspired by true events or created purely from imagination, she desires to write stories from this captivating era that haven't been written before of those on the edges of society, the paupers, the spies, the workers and those who have not had a voice. Adele studied English at the University of Exeter before moving into an eclectic career of publishing and marketing. Having worked with the National Trust's photography department for two years, Adele travelled the country to visit the landscapes and historical places that have carved England and Wales' heritage. When Covid struck, the opportunity disappeared overnight, and Adele committed her time to ghost writing and authoring her own stories. Since then, she has had over twenty successful books published and hopes to turn that success into stories now written in her own name.

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Check out Adele's website, X and Facebook. 

Adrian Vincent worked in Fleet Street for twenty-seven years, becoming managing editor of IPC’s educational magazines. He is the author of many books on art and antiques, novels and true crime.

Alan Williams was a journalist and foreign correspondent, reporting from notable hotspots worldwide including Hungary in 1956, Algeria, Vietnam and Northern Ireland. In 1962 he started writing thrillers which brought him the accolade "the natural heir to Ian Fleming" but it was his well-researched spy stories such as The Beria Papers and Gentleman Traitor (which featured real-life traitor Kim Philby) which brought him international success. Alan sadly passed away in 2020.

Alexander Paul Charrier McKee OBE (25 July 1918 – 22 July 1992) was a British journalist, military historian, and diver who published nearly thirty books.

From tales spun for her teddies when she was a child (usually about mermaids) to film scripts, plays and novels, Alexandra Walsh has always been a storyteller. Words are her world. For over 25 years, she has been a journalist writing for a wide range of publications including national newspapers and glossy magazines. She spent some years working in the British film industry, as well as in television and radio: researching, advising, occasionally presenting and always writing. Books dominate Alexandra’s life. She reads endlessly and tends to become a bit panicky if her next three books are not lined up and waiting. Characters, places, imagery all stay with her and even now she finds it difficult to pass an old wardrobe without checking it for a door to Narnia. As for her magical letter when she was 11, she can only assume her cat caught the owl! Alexandra’s other passion is history, particularly the untold tales of women. Whether they were queens or paupers, their voices resonate with their stories, not only about their own lives but about ours, too. The women of the Tudor court have inspired her novels. Researching and writing The Marquess House Trilogy (Book One: The Catherine Howard Conspiracy) has brought together her love of history, mysteries and story-telling.

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You can contact Alexandra Walsh on Twitter or check out her website.

Alice Chetwynd Ley was born on 12 October 1913 in Halifax, Yorkshire, the first child of a journalist, Fred Humphrey and his wife, Alice Mary (née Chetwynd): she was given the name and surname of her mother in addition to her father’s surname. Her father left home to serve overseas as an officer in the First World War in Palestine, Egypt and France, but returned to take up again his chosen profession of journalism. The family moved around the country as the father took jobs on different regional newspapers, and Alice’s early schooling took place in Selkirk and Sheffield, but when they settled in Birmingham she went to King Edward VI Grammar School for Girls in Edgbaston. In 1959 Alice enrolled part-time for an extra-mural Diploma in Sociology of the University of London, for which she studied at the relatively local Harrow College. This course included work on the eighteenth century, and in October of the same year she published her first novel, The Jewelled Snuff Box with the London-based publisher, Robert Hale. Apart from historical research conducted through the local library and via the printed word, Alice also did a great deal of field research into locations, taking short holidays in likely settings, and exploring many aspects of the Napoleonic period, from old inns to smugglers’ coves. She was well-informed on costume and ‘manners’ generally, and would become indignant when costume dramas on television ‘got it wrong’. Most of her novels go back from the Regency (strictly speaking, 1811-20) and the overlapping Napoleonic period into the later part of the eighteenth century, and she created one family whose fortunes she followed in a short series (the Eversley saga). Alice sadly passed away in 2004. You can check out her website here.

Alis Hawkins grew up on a dairy farm in Cardiganshire. Her inner introvert thought it would be a good idea to become a shepherd and, frankly, if she had, she might have been published sooner. As it was, three years reading English at Corpus Christi College, Oxford revealed an extrovert streak and a social conscience which saw her train as a Speech and Language Therapist. She has spent the subsequent three decades variously bringing up two sons, working with children and young people on the autism spectrum and writing fiction, non-fiction and plays. She writes the kind of books she likes to read: character-driven historical crime and mystery fiction with what might be called literary production values. Having lived in various English cathedral cities, Alis now lives with her partner in the Forest of Dean. Interestingly, their first contact with their now-home was a research trip for The Black and the White into the techniques of medieval charcoal-making. What Alis had assumed would be an interesting hour or two turned into a fascinating weekend and, having relocated to the Forest, she and her partner are now regular volunteers at the Dean Heritage Centre’s annual charcoal ‘earth burn’ in May.

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You can contact Alis through her website and follow her on Facebook and X.

Alistair Forrest writes historical fiction, so far six novels with a new series set around Caesar’s invasions of Britain on the way. As the son of a Royal Navy officer, it’s hardly surprising he frequently dives into ancient sea-faring adventure. Alistair was brought up in the Middle East, travelling to school in the UK. He began a career in journalism at the South Wales Echo in the same newsroom as the author Ken Follett, later working for other regional daily newspapers. He then chose a career path of editing magazines before becoming principal of a public relations company. “I’m delighted to have signed with the Sapere team and look forward to seeing my novels join the works of such an amazing family of talented authors,” he says. Today, his love of writing fiction is only interrupted by his work as editor of a natural health magazine and the States of Alderney, the government of the island where he lives with his wife Lynda and two very large dogs.

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Connect with Alistair by signing up to his newsletter or visiting his website.

Amy Licence is a historian of women's lives in the medieval and early modern period, from queens to commoners. Her particular interest lies in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century, in gender relations, queenship and identity, rites of passage, pilgrimage, female orthodoxy and rebellion, superstition, magic, fertility and childbirth. She is also interested in Modernism, specifically Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group, Picasso and Post-Impressionism. She has been a teacher for over twenty years. Amy has written for The Guardian, The TLS, The New Statesman, The English Review, The Huffington Post, The London Magazine and contributes regularly to BBC History Magazine. She has been interviewed regularly for BBC radio, including Woman's Hour, and has appeared in several TV documentaries. ​"A page-turning collage of lives" — ​Times Literary Supplement ​"This insight is so rare and so valuable … a considered and scholarly account of the matriarch of the House of York" (on Cecily Neville: Mother of Kings) — Author Philippa Gregory "Living Like a Tudor deftly recreates the medieval landscape, drawing on the five senses to offer a glimpse of the sights, smells and tastes of 15th- through 17th-century England." — Smithsonian Magazine "A long overdue biography of one of the most dramatic medieval heroines – vivid, very readable, and wonderfully detailed." — Author Sarah Gristwood "What an artist does with colours on a canvas,​ Amy Licence does with words on paper." — ​​Amazon reviewer Anne Marie Bouchard "Amy Licence... is unquestionably the most prolific historian writing today. Her output of books in recent years is incredible, the culmination of a life’s fascination and study of the subject." — Historian Nathen Amin "In each of Licence's books I've read and reviewed, she reminds me to be careful how I "interpret" the historical people, especially in regards to the era in which they lived. I appreciate Amy bringing my mind back to where it needs to be, to not make hasty judgments, and to take in to account the society, and culture, and unique circumstance in which they lived." —Reviewer Annette Hart Kristynik "One aspect of Licence’s writing I most appreciate is that she makes it very clear what is fact and what is supposition. I particularly noticed in this biography that she often offered multiple interpretations of various actions, which I thought added depth to her writing." — Reviewer Deborah, North Texas "Amy Licence is one of the best historical writers out there. She is not an apologist, but a responsible historian out to give as much information as she can without imposing her own point of view." — Author Carole P Roman "Amy Licence is a very good writer. She puts you right in the heart of her books. For me, they are unputdownable." — Amazon review "Licence delves deep into every whispered rumour and innuendo, using solid research to confirm or dismiss each reported fling. Her account is engaging and readable; treading the fine line between popular and academic history with expert precision. Even if you are well-read on the king's many relationships, there are plenty of gems in here that I haven't seen anywhere else!" — Author Adrienne Dillard

Angela Ranson is a Canadian expat who used to spend her days teaching teenagers English and History. She now enjoys living in the wild beauty of North Yorkshire and working as a university administrator. In 2014, she earned a doctorate in the history of sixteenth-century England from the University of York, and spent several years publishing non-fiction articles about the early years of Queen Elizabeth I. Most recently, she acted as editor and contributing author for the book Defending the Faith: John Jewel and the Elizabethan Church (Penn State Press, 2018). C.S. Lewis once said: ‘Write about what really interests you, whether it is real things or imaginary things, and nothing else.’ In Angela’s case, real and imaginary things often blend into one story. Her novels attempt to recreate the atmosphere of Tudor England, exploring fresh themes and ideas by finding fictional solutions to real-life crimes and mysteries. She tries to create puzzles that the reader can solve by tracing the clues, and loves including ciphers, cryptic messages, secret treasures and hidden meanings. As in life, things are not always what they seem. That’s what makes it interesting. Check out Angela's website and blog. 

Angelina Hill is a historical fiction writer, with a passion for the untold stories of women in the Elizabethan era. Her first research paper, written in third grade on Queen Elizabeth I, inspired and captivated her with the idea that a single woman could be queen. Angelina graduated Magna Cum Laude from Utah State University in history and psychology with an emphasis on family development. She is a fourth-generation teacher, and a third-generation historian and writer. She has served on the Henderson Writer’s Group board, helped facilitate the 2019 Las Vegas Writers Conference, and attended several other writers’ conferences. While attending conferences she found her critique group — including Amanda Skenandore, author of The Nurse’s Secret — and her publisher, Amy Durant at Sapere Books. You can connect with her on her website.

Anthony Galvin trained as a physicist, then worked as a journalist for a decade, covering the crime beat during the infamous Limerick drug war. His first book was a definitive account of that conflict, Family Feud: Gangland Limerick Exposed. It became the most shoplifted book in Ireland. He followed it with several more true crime titles. His first thriller, The Christmas Killer, was published by Penguin in 2014. Anthony quit journalism to concentrate on writing full-time, and on his second career as a magician and comedian. He travels widely doing magic and hypnosis shows. He has performed throughout Europe, in America, and in the Middle East. He lives outside Cork, Ireland, and when not writing thrillers, he enjoys hiking and climbing. He writes factual books as Anthony Galvin, and fiction as Dean Carson and occasionally Jim Gallows.

Get in touch: 

You can check out Anthony's website or follow him on Facebook.

Richardson was born in 1899 in the Kensington district of London and educated at Marlborough College. In 1940 he was commissioned in the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve (Administrative and Special Duties Branch). Richardson's most well-known work is probably Wingless Victory: The Story of Sir Basil Embry's Escape from Occupied France in the Summer of 1940. Richardson also wrote under the pseudonym Patrick Wynnton.

Aola Vandergriff, American writer and New York Times bestselling author of twenty gothic and historical romance novels, was a voracious reader and prolific poet from childhood. She launched her writing career at seventeen by publishing a book of poetry, winning her accolades, prizes, and her own radio program. At the onset of WWII, she married a young soldier, Bill Vandergriff. His post-war job took them through several states while she focused on raising their six children, but she never stopped reading. As the children grew up, her long-suppressed desire to write caught fire, beginning with the publication of 2,500 articles and short stories. She eventually turned to novels, travelling to faraway countries and continents to research her books. At home, she wrote while Bill built her an adobe hacienda in a haunted New Mexico canyon. Through all of life’s adventures, Aola continued to use the written word to bind her research with her imagination and create her beloved tales of danger and romance.

Austin Hernon lives in Nottinghamshire with wife Mandy. Born in the middle of World War II and spending lots of nights in an air raid shelter, it was no surprise to find him following a military career when he survived twenty-six years, mostly in the REME, where he was a mechanic specialising in underwater recovery. A worldwide traveller and someone who has spent many years living abroad, he is unwilling to give up that habit now that he is retired and travels widely. He first gained a degree in Social Sciences before he took up the challenge of writing, and has so far produced eight historical fiction novels with another in progress.

Get in touch with Austin

Take a look at his website: www.history-reimagined.co.uk And find out more about his books on his Facebook page: History Reimagined

Ava McKevitt is a creative writer of predominantly historical fiction. She also enjoys reading and writing fantasy and magical realism, which she often incorporates into her work. She studied a BA (Hons) in Classics, Ancient History, and Archaeology at Trinity College Dublin, subjects which she now teaches as a tutor. Originally from the Republic of Ireland, Ava is pursuing an MA in Creative Writing at the University of Manchester, which she hopes to use to grow as a creative writer, branching out into other forms and genres. Always fascinated by culture and history, her creative writing often discusses cross-cultural issues and explores belief and faith. A storyteller at heart, she strongly believes in the purpose of stories to inform and inspire, with the power to unite.

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You can get in touch with Ava via Twitter and Instagram.

Actor and writer Chris (C. C.) Humphreys has played Hamlet in Calgary, Caleb the gladiator in Tunisia, waltzed as Lord Mountbatten in London’s West End, conned the landlord of the Rovers Return in Coronation Street, patrolled the Sun Hill beat in The Bill, commanded a starfleet in Andromeda, voiced Salem the cat in the original Sabrina, and is a dead immortal in Highlander. He has written four plays and twenty-four novels including The French Executioner, runner-up for the CWA Steel Dagger for Thrillers; Chasing the Wind; the Jack Absolute Trilogy; Vlad: The Last Confession; A Place Called Armageddon and Shakespeare’s Rebel. He has also written both YA and epic fantasy, the last with the Immortals’ Blood Trilogy for Gollancz. His novel Plague won Canada's Arthur Ellis Award for Best Crime Novel. He has an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia. His novels have been translated into twelve languages. Last summer saw the publication of his World War Two thriller, Someday I’ll Find You, a bestseller in Canada. His most recent book is One London Day, a modern thriller, first of a series. He lives in Totnes, Devon. Read more about Chris on his website.

Born St Vincent, West Indies in 1897 C. E. “Peter” Lucas Phillips was educated at St Lawrence College and King’s College London. During World War 1 he served with the Royal Artillery in France and Flanders. He was promoted to Major before he was 21 and was awarded MC and Croix De Guerre. During World War 2 he served with Montgomery in the Western Desert, and in Italy. He was promoted to Brigadier and awarded an OBE and bar for his service. He wrote several war books including Cockleshell Heroes, Escape of the Amethyst, Alamein, The Greatest Raid of All and Springboard to Victory. He was a passionate gardener and has also written books on gardening, including the much acclaimed The Small Garden and Roses for the Small Garden. He met his wife Barbara at a dance in 1921, they married in 1924 and subsequently had 4 daughters. He died in 1984.

It was as a child on the move with her Forces family that Claire discovered a fascination for the past that led to an abiding interest in the Wars of the Roses and a lifetime of research. Following a degree in Medieval History, she founded and ran a school for neurodiverse children and young people. Yet history was never far from her mind and, embarking on her writing career, she returned to her historical roots with Mortal Fire — the gold medal-winning first book in The Secret of the Journal series. Living in the South West of England, her love of history is equalled only by her delight in the natural world and the unruly sea by which she lives with her family, assorted animals and overworked coffee machine.

Contact

You can find Claire on Instagram, on Facebook at CF Dunn and on her website.

C. P.  Giuliani lives in the whereabouts of Mantua, Italy (incidentally the place where Shakespeare’s Romeo gets the poison) in the company of her very patient mother, two unhinged cats and a large garden. She began by studying the Classics and International Relations – and then swerved to the timber trade first, and later the pen and the stage. A passion for history and stories has led her to write historical fiction both in Italian and English. She’s been called an Anglomaniac, an editor, a playwright, a translator, a director-in-training, a blogger, and several kinds of writer – and never denied any of it. Then again, she could hardly deny her involvement with Mantua’s historic Campogalliani theatre company, where she writes, teaches playwriting, does backstage work, and very occasionally understudies. She is a member of the Historical Novel Society, a reviewer for the HNR, and the founder of the Italian chapter of the Paper Stage project. Her Tom Walsingham Mysteries are espionage adventure thrillers set during the Elizabethan era in Tudor England.

Get in touch

You can get in touch with C. P. Giuliani on her website or follow her on X.

C V Chauhan was a born in a small town in the Rift Valley in Kenya and emigrated with his family to Leicester at the age of 11. He graduated from the University of York and taught history in various secondary schools in London and Birmingham. After periods of working for local council education departments in the Midlands and West Yorkshire, he was appointed a schools’ inspector and inspected schools all over England. He recently gave up full-time work to focus on his writing. His Inspector Sharma Thrillers are set in Leicestershire and are packed full of suspense. C V Chauhan loves to travel and enjoys watching cricket. Get in touch You can get in touch with C V Chauhan on his website.

Cara Clayton is the author of the Tapestry Tales Medieval Saga series: English historical fiction set in the fourteenth century. She is a member of the Society of Authors, the Romantic Novelists’ Association and the Historical Novelists’ Society.

Carolyn Banks was born in Pittsburgh, PA. She went to a Catholic grade school and, like all little Catholic girls, wanted to be a nun. She was 11 when she first saw her name in print (attached to a Letter to the Editor that she'd written) in the Pittsburgh Press. Immediately, she abandoned all spiritual leanings. Now she wanted to be a writer. As a writer, she was always writing little vignettes and dropping them here and there around the house. Mostly these focused on some disaster she was facing. She was losing her hearing. She was losing her eyesight. She had 30 days to live. She imagined herself into all these situations and wrote about them with adolescent angst and zeal. She remembers hearing her mother say to her father, "Look, Phil. Now she has leprosy." She took Creative Writing in college and her teacher told her, over and over again, she ought to write a novel. A couple of years after graduation she was the editor of Horse Play, a monthly equestrian magazine. One night she drank too much wine and called the teacher, asking, "Do you still think I could write a novel?" He said "No," adding, "If you had it in you, you'd have done it by now." Carolyn hung up on the man and began work on her first novel, Mr. Right. His "no" activated what Carolyn describes as her "Oh, yeah?" impulse: "a desire to show those who underestimate me that they're wrong." In Banks' words: "Although Mr. Right has a lot of sex in it, I think of it as an innocent book. I wrote it without any knowledge of the publishing industry. The one editor (out of about 20) who liked it kept screaming at me. 'What is it? Is it a mystery? Is it a women's book? What part of a bookstore would it be shelved in? It's funny! Funny! I like it, but...'" Banks says, "Mr. Right contains all of what I like to write about. I like to be funny. I like to be (safely) scared. I like intelligent banter, like having fun with language. I think that aspect, the banter, is called 'stichomythia,' and I like knowing oddball scholarly stuff like that." Mr. Right was written in the age of Aquarius. Unfortunately, it was published in the same month Fear of Flying hit bookstores. Her agent and her editor kept saying, "Enough with the funny already." Three serious suspense novels followed: The Darkroom, The Girls on the Row, and Patchwork. In between, Banks began to review true crime books for The Washington Post and Crimebeat magazine. "I was up to my eyeballs in gore," Banks says, "I was on the beach, relaxing, reading a particularly graphic book about John Wayne Gacy. That did it for me. I didn't want to be wallowing in books about real murders and really ugly stuff." She turned to what she calls, “murder tra-la,” writing a lighthearted mystery series featuring Robin Vaughan, an amateur sleuth who blunders into trouble. Robin’s passion is horses and her sport of choice is dressage. These books are Death by Dressage, Groomed for Death, Death on the Diagonal, A Horse to Die For, and Murder Well Bred. Sapere Books is publishing them as the Robin Vaughan Equestrian Mysteries.

Cathy Wallace is an author, journalist and hopeless romantic who wrote her first book at the tender age of six. Entitled Tarka the Otter, it was a shameless rip-off of the Henry Williamson classic of the same name, and the manuscript was lost after she sent it to her pen-pal and never heard a jot from her since. Fortunately, reception to her writing became more favourable and she spent ten years working for a range of newspapers and magazines covering everything from general elections and celebrity scandals to cats stuck up trees and village fetes. She has been freelance since 2011 and written for The Telegraph, Red Online, Total Women’s Cycling and other lifestyle and cycling publications and websites. She is the author of three non-fiction books and her debut and thankfully non-plagiarised novel Summer at Hollyhock House is published by Sapere Books. Cathy lives on the leafy London/Surrey border with her two children and a dog with only two facial expressions, hungry and guilty. Her hobbies include mountain biking, photography, wandering around outside getting lost, fantasising about getting her garden under control, reading, looking at pretty things on Instagram and drinking tea.

Get in touch

You can find Cathy on Instagram.

Sir Cecil Beaton (1904-1980) was a photographer of considerable distinction, who photographed most of the interesting figures of the twentieth century, from the Queen and Queen Mother, the Windsors, stars such as Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Audrey Hepburn and Marilyn Monroe, to figures of the 1960s such as Rudolph Nureyev, the Rolling Stones and Twiggy. He was also a noted war photographer and took many fashion photographs for Condé Nast. He was also a man of considerable style, an arbiter of taste, designer of sets and costume for opera, ballet and theatre, an inveterate traveller, and throughout this long career, he was a diarist from 1922 until 1974 (and even a little later). During his lifetime he published six volumes – The Wandering Years – 1961 The Years Between – 1965 The Happy Years - 1972 The Strenuous Years – 1973 The Restless Years - 1976 The Parting Years - 1978 A composite volume, Self Portrait with Friends, edited by Richard Buckle, was published in 1979. Later there were two further volumes, The Unexpurgated Beaton (2002), and Beaton in the Sixties (2003), both edited by Hugo Vickers. Cecil Beaton won three Oscars for his work on the films, Gigi and My Fair Lady. He was awarded a CBE in 1957, and knighted for his service to the arts in 1972.

Charles Whiting (18 December 1926–24 July 2007) was a British writer and military historian and with some 350 books of fiction and non-fiction to his credit. Born in the Bootham area of York, England, he was a pupil at the prestigious Nunthorpe Grammar School, leaving at the age of 16 to join the British Army by lying about his age. Keen to be in on the wartime action, Whiting was attached to the 52nd Reconnaissance Regiment and by the age of 18 saw duty as a sergeant in France, Holland, Belgium and Germany in the latter stages of World War II. While still a soldier, he observed conflicts between the highest-ranking British and American generals which he would write about extensively in later years.

Charlie Garratt was born in Manchester and moved to Coventry, Warwickshire at the age of 18 where he trained as a telecommunications engineer. Increasing involvement in his local community led to a change of career and over thirty years in the field of community development across the United Kingdom. During this time he was regularly writing non-fiction and is credited as author and co-author of a number of books and guides on community participation. In 2006, Charlie moved to Donegal, Ireland and this is when his fiction writing began, through involvement in a creative writing group. Charlie is currently working on a fictionalised memoir and on a third novel in the Inspector James Given series. In 2016, three of Charlie's short stories were included in a collection, Wild Atlantic Words, fifteen tales drawing from life along the west coast of Ireland. He returned to England in the Spring of 2018 and now lives in Shropshire. When he's not writing, Charlie enjoys gardening, playing and listening to music, genealogy, short-mat bowls and, of course, reading crime fiction.

Raymond "Chaz" Bowyer (29 September 1926 – 18 June 2008) was a Royal Air Force armaments and explosives instructor who, after he retired from service, wrote and edited over forty books relating to the operations, aircraft, and men of the Royal Flying Corps, Royal Air Force, and Royal Naval Air Service. He also edited for publication the memoirs of the pilots C.P.O. Bartlett, Eric Crundall, and Gwilym H. Lewis.

Cheryl Sawyer first felt the drive to write historical fiction while working at the Château de Breteuil, south of Paris. This heritage masterpiece was so beautiful that it was only too tempting to conjure up the real people, from marquise or duke to maid or footman, whose daily and dramatic encounters filled the place with vibrant life. Since then, the eighteenth century in France, England and America has inspired her to write twelve historical novels, published in several languages. Her main career has been in publishing but her experience is eclectic. She has been a bartender in Essex; teacher of English in France and Italy; freelance editor of The Bone People by Keri Hulme, winner of the 1985 Booker Prize; translator of journals by eighteenth-century French explorers in the Pacific; food and wine writer for Better Business magazine in New Zealand; publishing manager for Reader’s Digest Select Editions and opera reviewer for the Australian Jewish News. Her books have been longlisted for awards by the Historical Novel Society in the UK and the American Library in Paris. In 2025, while visiting the Marquis de Breteuil once again, Cheryl found the same magic within the château’s majestic walls. She is now writing full-time in a beachside town north of Sydney, but she continues to delve first-hand into the most distinctive and intriguing corners of history in Europe, the UK and the United States.

Get in touch

Visit Cheryl’s website to stay up to date with her news and latest releases.

Christine Evans was brought up in Moss Side, Manchester and then moved to Wythenshawe, a sprawling council estate at the edge of south Manchester. Leaving grammar school at sixteen, she went to work in a bank. After Christine married she gave up work to have her children and, after a spell of temping, worked at the Bishop of Manchester’s office for twenty years. During that time she began night school classes for creative writing. One of the tutors suggested that she send off some of her short stories to magazines and her first short story was published in 1999 in Ireland’s Own. Since then she has had over two hundred short stories published in various magazines, mostly in People’s Friend but also in Ireland’s Own, Take a Break, Bella, My Weekly and Yours. All sorts of idea set Christine off, memories, funny things that happened to people or someone’s love story, not to mention eavesdropping. She has written three serials for People’s Friend and “Song of the Shuttle” began as one of those serials. She became interested in the Lancashire Cotton Famine caused by the American Civil war. The Famine rarely makes an appearance in any history books, so she decided to weave a story around it, set in Lancashire and America. Christine sadly passed in 2020. Rest in peace Christine.

Claire Gray lives in the South Lakes with her family. She studied Creative Writing at the Cumbria Institute of the Arts, which no longer exists, having been absorbed by the University of Cumbria. She graduated in 2006 and then went on to complete a journalism course at Darlington College. That same year, she won a Northern Promise Award from New Writing North, and her work was featured in their anthology, entitled Ten Years On. Claire now works as a freelance copywriter and continues to write short stories, some of which have been published in magazines and online. Recently, she has been guest editor for the prose section of SpeakEasy Magazine, which showcases Cumbrian writing. In 2015, she received editing advice from The Literary Consultancy through their Free Read scheme. They subsequently felt that her manuscript, Running in Circles, showed potential, and began approaching literary professionals on Claire’s behalf. This resulted in the novel being placed with Sapere Books, and Claire is very excited to be a part of their inaugural launch list.

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Follow Claire on Twitter to keep up with her news.

Clare Hawkins was born and brought up in Scotland, to an Irish father and an English mother, and now lives in Essex. A graduate of the universities of Edinburgh and Sheffield, she worked in education for nearly forty years and is still involved in the field, as a volunteer adult education tutor and guidance adviser. After relinquishing one of her part-time teaching jobs, Clare found the time to embark on the experiment of writing a historical novel and soon became hooked. An excellent mentoring programme and encouragement from a group of writer friends led to the completion of several novels, some recognition in competitions and three publications. Her interest in history is wide-ranging in terms of periods, and inspiration comes from many sources: stories of the lives of ancient relatives, visits to historic sites, striking landscapes and buildings, reading of fiction and non-fiction. She loves creating stories around the lives of ordinary people whose experiences and adventures are affected by wider social and political contexts. Working with Sapere Books has given Clare an exciting way of continuing her enjoyable compulsion and her hopes of producing engaging and interesting entertainment for readers.

Get in touch

You can get in touch with Clare on her website or follow her on wivenhoewriters.blogspot.com.

Coirle grew up in the Burren Perfumery in a house full of fragrant books and now lives in Kinvara, Co. Galway. After completing her MA and PhD in Medieval and Early Modern literature, she began working on what would become her debut novel, Keepers of the Dead, set in Eleanor of Aquitaine’s court in Poitiers. Her next book, The Secret Language of Birds, is also set in Medieval France. She has always read widely and wrote her first murder mystery, Donald Duck is Dead, at ten years old. She read Donald in instalments to her captivated (or captured) classmates. She has worked as a Shakespeare and verse-speaking tutor in Malta and Limerick and as an old and middle English tutor in UCC. Her focus in on storytelling and creating characters with emotional depth. She is delighted to be joining Sapere Books!  

  Cora Harrison was born in Cobh, in southern Ireland, but was educated in the city of Cork. After attaining a first honours degree in French, she went to London and worked initially for the Linguaphone Institute. When her children were young she and her husband moved to Kent where she took up teaching and after some years became a headteacher. After retirement, she and her husband relocated back to Ireland where they bought a twenty-acre farm with a river, an Iron Age fort and a derelict cottage. This place inspired the seventeen ‘Drumshee’ books, historical novels for children. Inspired by the success of these books, and other books for children, Cora began to write the thirteen Burren mysteries for adults, using the ancient Brehon laws of medieval Ireland and set in the scenic stony land of the Burren in the west of Ireland, beside the Atlantic Ocean. These historical mysteries were followed by the Reverend Mother series, six of them at this moment, dealing with her native city of Cork during the tumultuous times after the war of independence and the civil war, during the early part of the twentieth century.

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Get in touch with Cora through her website.

D R Bailey was raised in a family of bibliophiles. From an early age, he developed an eclectic taste in fiction including Sci-Fi, Romance, Crime, and the Classics. Some of his favourite authors are Georgette Heyer, Gerald Durrell, Jane Austen, Peter James, Ellis Peters, and Isaac Asimov. At the age of eleven, he wrote his first fictional story about his toy teddy bear clan. Since then, he has published two five-book series, DI Gallway Investigates and  the Bernadette Mackenna Cases. He has engaged in several careers and is also a Doctor of Philosophy. D R Bailey continues his writing journey with The Spitfire Mavericks Thrillers for Sapere Books: action-packed aviation adventures set during the Second World War and featuring a team of vigilante pilots. He is excited to be part of the illustrious Sapere clan and confesses to a lifelong interest in World War II history.

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You can get in touch with D R Bailey on his website or follow him on Facebook and X.

Daniel Colter is the author of the Knights Templar Thrillers: action-packed, authentic historical Crusader military adventures set during the Medieval era. He has a graduate degree in anthropology/archaeology and worked for twenty-four years as an archaeologist. He traipsed over many a remote, rugged landscape searching for prehistoric sites until life nudged him in a new direction. Now he writes novels. Daniel has a long-held fascination with ancient warfare, medieval history, and old sagas, which he uses as inspiration to spin epic adventure tales. When not writing, he can be found hunched over an anvil, burning his fingers while trying to make swords and knives. Daniel lives in the mountains of Utah with his wife and two lazy Labrador retrievers. He writes fiction as Daniel Colter, and archaeology as Danny Mullins.

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You can learn more about Daniel’s books on Facebook.

David Clensy spent more than twenty years in regional newspaper journalism and was twice named South-West Feature Writer of the Year at the EDF Regional Media Awards. Based in Wiltshire, but originally from Birkenhead in Merseyside, he is passionate about historical fiction. His 2024 standalone debut novel, Prayer in Time of War, tells the story of elderly veteran Ernie as he returns to an Italy transformed from his experiences during the Second World War, in search of the young woman he left behind in the back streets of Naples half a century before. His Romulus Hutchinson Naval Adventures are action-packed, authentic historical adventures following twin brothers fighting with the Royal Navy and the Merchant Navy during the Second World War. He has also written a number of non-fiction books, including Island Life: A History of Looe Island (2006), The Mole of Edge Hill (2006), Walking The Wolds Way (2007) and Walking the White Horses (2023). Get in touch You can check out David's website or follow him on Facebook, X, Bluesky, Instagram and Threads.

David Downie was born in Singapore in 1948, where his father, also David, was recovering after being injured during a (Communist) terrorist ambush three months earlier on the rubber estate he managed in northern Malaya, near Kuala Lumpur. David’s first — and possibly only — book is about his father’s journey as a volunteer in the Federated States of Malaya up to his internment after the capitulation of Singapore, and his three and a half years as a prisoner of war in Thailand and in camps along the Thai-Burma Railway. During his internment David’s father kept a secret diary, which forms the core of the book, and concludes with his life post-war. After months recuperating in his home city of Edinburgh, David’s father retrained to become a tropical specialist with the Colonial Agricultural Service. Subsequently, the family spent periods in East and West Africa and Central America. David and his sister Anthea were sent to England to be educated, like many colonial children at that time. David attended Grenville College in Bideford, North Devon, then Edinburgh University to study Ecological Science, where he met his wife Sheila, then a medical student. A postgraduate degree in Town and Regional Planning led to work in Strathclyde Regional Council and then with the Countryside Commission for Scotland (later Scottish Natural Heritage) in Perth. Following retirement David has kept busy, briefly running a campervan hire business, volunteering with the local ‘Bloom’ group, and founding and chairing a local charity to establish a community hub. Describing himself as a ‘grasshopper hobbyist’ he’s dabbled with beekeeping, woodturning, watercolour painting and cooking. He and Sheila have three children and five grandchildren and still live close to Perth.

David Field was born in post-war Nottingham, and educated at Nottingham High School. After obtaining a Law degree he became a career-long criminal law practitioner and academic, emigrating in 1989 to Australia, where he still lives. Combining his two great loves of History and the English language he began writing historical novels as an escape from the realities of life in the criminal law, but did not begin to publish them until close to fulltime retirement, when digital publishing offered a viable alternative to literary agencies, print publishers and rejection slips. Now blessed with all the time in the world, his former hobby has become a full time occupation as he enjoys life in rural New South Wales with his wife, sons and grandchildren to keep him firmly grounded in the reality of the contemporary world.

Get in touch with David

You can contact David through his website or via Facebook.

David was a lawyer, but left legal practice some years ago to take up further opportunities in his specialist area of aviation. During his career, he has been an advisor and director in a range of aviation organisations. He is also a professionally qualified pilot. In 2022, David became an author. Success in an international writing competition resulted in Sapere Books inviting him to write three, aviation-themed, historical fiction novels. The John Noble Fighter Ace Thriller series, being published over the course of 2025, followed. When writing, David enjoys combining fact and fiction. He likes to weave his stories through known places and events, often using characters inspired by real people, but always using his imagination. As well as writing, David enjoys travel, playing golf with friends, and mountain-biking. He has ridden many of the amazing trails available in Australia and New Zealand, but carefully avoids any advanced, experts-only, tracks. David lives in Christchurch, New Zealand.

Colonel David de Crespigny Smiley, LVO, OBE, MC & Bar (11 April 1916 – 9 January 2009) was a British special forces and intelligence officer. He fought in the Second World War in Palestine, Iraq, Persia, Syria, Western Desert and with Special Operations Executive (SOE) in Albania and Thailand.

Donald Macintyre (26 January 1904–23 May 1981) was a Royal Navy officer during the Second World War and a successful convoy escort commander. Following the war, he wrote numerous books on British naval history. Macintyre joined the Royal Navy in the 1920s and, having qualified as a pilot in the Fleet Air Arm, flew fighter aircraft from the carriers HMS Hermes on the China Station and HMS Courageous in home waters. After a serious illness he was passed fully fit for sea service again, and obtained command of HMS Kingfisher, a new type of anti-submarine ship where he first acquired his overriding interest in submarine hunting. Between 1940 and 1944 (when he was transferred to a shore posting) he was among the most successful submarine hunters in any Allied navy, transforming the Battle of the Atlantic by his successes against the U-boat menace. After the war ended he wrote numerous books, including U-Boat Killer, The Battle of the Atlantic and The Naval War Against Hitler.

Donna Gowland is a writer and teacher who lives by the seaside with her family and schnauzer dog. A lifelong lover of literature, Donna published her first poem while in junior school and has written prize-winning poetry, short stories and non-fiction (and is also an award-winning singer and dancer). A keen interest in science as a child led Donna to scientific research on reanimation and Victorian science - a fear of blood prevented a promising scientific career. Instead, Donna turned her attention to fiction, discovering Mary Shelley's seminal novel Frankenstein and devouring everything she could find about its writer. A love of murder mystery, Paris, and an endless fascination with the relationship between Mary and Percy Shelley created the Mary Shelley Investigations series! Get in touch You can follow Donna on X, Threads and Instagram.

Doreen Tovey was born in Bristol in 1918 and raised by her grandparents, her love of animals was fostered by her grandmother who was an inveterate rescuer of anything in need. The family shared its home with cats, dogs and an owl called Gladstone. Having attended grammar school she had a couple of boring jobs before joining Imperial Tobacco as a typist/secretary before graduating to their public relations department. It was here that she met her future husband, Rene (called Charles in the books). Doreen Tovey was the author of more than a dozen books about the life she and her husband shared with their Siamese cats and other animals in Somerset, England. She was president of the Siamese Cat Club, President of the West of England Cat Club and President of the RSPCA for North Somerset. Doreen passed away in 2008.

Coming soon 

Sapere Books are delighted to be reissuing Doreen's books, beginning in 2018. We currently have plans to republish seven of Doreen's books, charming tales of life surrounded by various pets, most importantly, cats. We are happy to announce that all author proceeds from the sales of Doreen's books will go to the North Somerset branch of the RSPCA.

Doris Leslie (née Oppenheim, later Lady Fergusson Hannay) (9 March 1891 – 30 May 1982), was a British novelist and historical biographer. Her novel Peridot Flight (1956) was serialised by the BBC in 1960. A number of her books had dust jackets with illustrated designs by period artists such as Philip Gough and Arthur Barbosa. She was married three times: in 1914 to John Leslie Isaacson (1889–1919); in 1930 to Reginald Vincent Cookes (1894–1948); and in 1936 to Walter Fergusson Leisrink Hannay, who was knighted in 1951 and died in 1961.

Dorothy Mack is a native New Englander, born in Rhode Island and educated at Brown and Harvard Universities. She and her husband have made their home in the National Capital Area for many years. They enjoy exchanging visits with their large extended family and try to take any opportunity for world travel.  

Historian and author. Chamberlin was the author of numerous popular history books ranging from ancient Rome to twentieth-century Britain. Although he was born in Jamaica, he returned to England with his father during the Great Depression. Chamberlin dropped out of school when he was fourteen and became an apprentice leather dresser. When he was old enough, he eagerly left this work behind to enlist in the Royal Navy in 1944. He served in the military until 1947 and then found work at the Norwich Public Library. It was here that his real education began, and Chamberlin took advantage of his vocation by reading history texts avidly. He later also worked at the Holborn Public Library and then for the book division at Readers’ Digest. His first book, The Count of Virtue: Giangaleazzo Visconti, Duke of Milan, was released in 1965. This would be followed by thirty more books over the next three decades. Among these are The Bad Popes (1969), The Sack of Rome (1979), The Nineteenth Century (1983), The Emperor, Charlemagne (1986), and The Tower of London: An Illustrated History (1989). Also active in historical preservation projects, Chamberlin helped rescue the Guildford Institute building from destruction in 1982 and had a monument to Admiral Horatio Nelson constructed on Mt. Etna in Italy. For the former endeavor, Chamberlin was recognized with an honorary degree from the University of Surrey in 1982.

Edward Wake-Walker, born in 1952, is the great nephew of Barbara Bertram, the central figure in A House for Spies. The son of a Royal Navy officer, he was educated at Marlborough College and Aix-en-Provence University. After two and a half years sampling the City’s reinsurance broking world, he joined the staff of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution in 1975. There, after a spell of organising volunteer fund raisers, he moved to public relations. He spent some years as editor of The Lifeboat magazine before becoming PR Director, a position he held for 16 years. On leaving the RNLI in 2002 he became a full-time writer and has published five books on the history of saving lives at sea as well as A House for Spies and the Owners Workshop Manual for the Westland Lysander. He is currently working on the biography of his grandfather, Admiral Sir Frederic Wake-Walker, who played a leading role off the beaches of Dunkirk in 1940 and in the pursuit of the Bismarck the following year. Edward lives with his wife on the Isle of Purbeck, Dorset.  

Elizabeth Bailey feels lucky to have found several paths that have given her immense satisfaction - acting, directing, teaching and, by no means least, writing. Through the years, each path has crossed the other, honing and deepening her abilities in each sphere. She has been privileged to work with some wonderful artistic people, and been fortunate enough to find publishers who believed in her and set her on the road. To invent a world and persuade others to believe in it, live in it for a while, is the sole aim of the novelist. Elizabeth's own love of reading has never abated, and if she can give a tithe of the pleasure to others as she has received herself, it's worth all the effort.

Elizabeth Lemarchand was an English writer of detective novels and short stories. Born in Devon in 1906, she was a teacher by profession, employed as deputy headmistress of the Godolphin School, Salisbury from 1943 until 1960, and as acting headmistress in 1959. Her first book, Death of an Old Girl, was published in 1967. Elizabeth wrote seventeen books in the acclaimed Pollard and Toye Investigation series: intriguing police procedurals set in rural England. Elizabeth passed away in 2000 at the age of 94.

Eric Helm is the pseudonym for the writing partnership of Kevin D. Randle and Bob Cornett. Kevin D. Randle Kevin D. Randle is a retired Army lieutenant colonel who served in Vietnam as a helicopter pilot, accumulating more than 1100 hours of combat flight time. In 2003 he deployed to Iraq as an intelligence officer. He served on active duty with the Army and later the Air Force. He was a member of the Iowa National Guard on his deployment into the Middle East. He retired from the National Guard in 2009. He is a graduate of the University of Iowa, has advanced degrees from California Coast University and American Military University. He has taught classes at both the community college and the university level. Randle is the author of dozens of books about the military, drawing on his own experiences as a soldier in a combat environment. He has also written nonfiction books about UFOs as well as science fiction. He teamed with Bob Cornett in the 1980s to create the Vietnam Ground Zero series as well as write many science fiction novels. He makes his home in Iowa where, if nothing else, the seasons change and sometimes the sun shines. Bob Cornett Bob Cornett (18 November 1952–1 April 2022) was a prolific author of science fiction, military, and adventure fiction. He was born in a small town in Iowa no one had ever heard of. Growing up, he developed an appreciation for hunting and fishing. At the University of Iowa, Bob worked for Dr James Van Allen and learned to fly under the AFROTC program. He served in the military as a Marine and worked as a fire-medic, private investigator, and a junior college instructor in both creative writing and EMS, among other positions. Bob made his home in New Mexico where he enjoyed shooting, ham radio, and retirement, when his three dogs and his cat would let him. Bob sadly passed away on 1 April 2022. His friend and co-author, Kevin D. Randle, remembers Bob here.

I first started writing as a child; mainly poetry, but there was one horrific novel (mercifully, never finished) in which a woman gives birth to a hideously deformed child in a thunderstorm. While I was bringing up my four children, I began writing and selling short stories to magazines before the enforced immobility following a fractured spine gave me the time to tackle my first novel, Dead Ernest. My main career was in nursing, but I also trained and worked for many years as a relationship counsellor with Relate. Widowed in 1992, I re-married and now live with my husband in Wiltshire, where I enjoy riding my horse in the beautiful Pewsey Vale, reading, writing, singing in our large church choir and keeping up with my grandchildren. I also write regularly to a prisoner on Texas Death Row and do local voluntary work with homeless and vulnerable adults. All my books are very strongly relationship-based. My writing has also been affected by my widowhood and my experiences with my Relate clients, and my books sometimes include issues of death and bereavement. Strangely (and not by design) they all seem to include pet animal funerals (not a subject which normally occupies my mind!). Get in touch with Frances You can contact Frances through her website or via Facebook.

Major-General Sir Francis Wilfred de Guingand, KBE, CB, DSO (28 February 1900 – 29 June 1979) was a British Army officer who served as Field Marshal Sir Bernard Montgomery's chief of staff from the Second Battle of El Alamein until the end of the Second World War. He played an important diplomatic role in sustaining relations between Montgomery and his peers and superiors. A graduate of the Royal Military College, Sandhurst, de Guingand joined the West Yorkshire Regiment (Prince of Wales's Own) in December 1919. He served in India and Ireland, and was seconded to the King's African Rifles in Nyasaland from 1926 to 1931. Through the intervention of Montgomery, with whom he had formed a friendship during their service together the 1920s and 1930s, he secured a nomination to 1935–36 course at the Staff College, Camberley. He served as Military Assistant to the Secretary of State for War, Leslie Hore-Belisha, from 1939 to 1940, in which role he had exposure to the most senior officers in the army and developed skills in diplomacy.

Born in Yorkshire, Frank Hubert Shaw (1878–1960) was a UK naval officer and author who saw active service during the First World War. A Captain in the Navy, he released a volume of stories in 1916 entitled Atlantic Nights which were based on his own experiences of mercantile marine life. Prior to being sent to Flanders as a Flight-Commander, Shaw was the captain of a famous commercial liner. A prolific writer, he also published fiction under the names Frank Cleveland, Archibald Guthrie, Grenville Hammerton, Frank Hubert, and Ernest Winchfield. His works appeared widely in Boys' Own Papers, with an estimated 7,000 stories to his credit and more than seventy books. His fiction reflects his wartime experience and is often patriotic and supportive of the military command. His memoir, Seas of Memory (1958), reflects this stance. His volumes of non-fiction/memoir include White Sails and Spindrift, Seas of Memory and Life Owes Me Nothing.

Frederick James Hodges was born a twin in 1899 in Northampton, England. When the First World War started in 1914, he was at Northampton Town and County School (now the Northampton School for Boys). Conscription immediately depleted businesses of their young men and the headmaster sent the author, aged 15, to the finance department of a local company. Frederick always regretted the premature end to his education. In 1917 at the age of 18 the author was drafted into the British Army and arbitrarily placed in the infantry, the Lancashire Fusiliers. The new recruit wase rushed to the battle lines in France, where he served until the war ended in November 1918. He was fortunate to survive. He returned to the same firm, becoming Chief Cashier. In retirement he enjoyed gardening, painting, travelling and Bible teaching. But his traumatic experience of war left indelible memories that generated a deep compulsion to write a warning for posterity. At the age of 80 he learned to type on a manual machine in a class of teenage girls. Without any notes he then typed from memory the manuscript of his book, Men of 18 in 1918. The book led the BBC to invite him to participate in documentaries on the First World War. The media then realised he was a fluent raconteur, able vividly to describe the social and economic scenes of the early 20th century. He participated in many TV documentaries describing the vast changes he had witnessed since the Victorian-Edwardian era. His natural and modest stance and the fact that he was then in his nineties added to the merit of his contributions. Aged 99, he was awarded the French Chevalier d’Honneur by President Chirac along with the few surviving British soldiers who had fought in France 1914–1918. He and his wife lived alone until they were both 100, when they moved into a Senior Home. At the age of 102, after seventy-seven years of marriage, they were identified as the oldest, longest married couple in the UK. The TV crew interviewing them asked for the secret of their long marriage. Their answer was ‘love’, which they were asked to define. “Love is giving, not getting”. Frederick died quietly in his sleep aged 102 and his wife died at 103. His twin brother had died at just six months.

Gail Lindenberg enjoys her home in Phillips Ranch, CA with her husband Gene and a furry cat named Smudge. Retired after thirty-seven years of teaching in public schools, Gail spends her time caring for her mother and her granddaughter. Gail wrote He Wrote Her Every Day while recovering from cancer. She presented a hard-cover version to her mother as a 90th birthday gift. Once the chemo fog lifted, she joined a writer's workshop to produce better edited editions. Gail often says that she felt as though her father was watching over her shoulder while she wrote about his letters. “Sometimes,” she notes, “I think he may have been shaking his head a bit.”

Get in contact with Gail

You can contact Gail and read more about the background of her book on her website.  

Born and raised in Newcastle upon Tyne and living all his life in the North East, Geoffrey Davison was first published at the age of 40 with The Spy Who Swapped Shoes and went on to publish twelve books. All were thrillers, set against backgrounds ranging from Cold War espionage to World War Two. With the support of Northern Arts, Geoffrey travelled widely in the name of research, visiting Berlin, other Eastern European cities, the South of France and later the far East.

Born the ninth child of ten and deemed by his parents to be destined for a naval career, Gilbert Hackforth-Jones (1900-1982) attended Osborne and Dartmouth Naval Colleges and joined the Grand Fleet on his seventeenth birthday. As a midshipman serving during World War I, he saw action on the Empress of India. After the war ended, he was granted a short period of study at Cambridge University. Whether his deep love of literature and drama was strengthened by this happy phase, one can only conjecture. Gilbert entered submarine service in 1920. He rose to the rank of Commander and was stationed with his wife Margaret and their young son in far-flung places, including China. In 1936 he retired from the Navy and briefly entered the profession of his stockbroker father, quickly discovering that it was not for him. But in his search for fulfilment and drawing on the wealth of experience he had already gathered at sea — in his leisure time he was a passionate yachtsman — he started to write. A short story accepted for publication by Blackwood’s in 1937 marked the beginning of a richly fertile and prolific writing career. During World War II he was recalled to the Navy, but not to life on the ocean. Serving on land inspecting weapons and running an Admiralty department drove him to write in earnest, and he published his first novel, Submarine Flotilla, in 1940. After 1945, there was no stopping him in his resolve to write for a living, and he proceeded to complete a novel and a children’s book most years. His love for the Navy and the characters of all ranks that served in it shows up all the time in his writing. The Green Sailors was a popular series of children’s adventure stories about sailing that was also aired on BBC radio. In all, he was to write some fifty books with a maritime focus, many of them novels that reveal his remarkable gift for storytelling and characterisation, but also collections of short stories and non-fiction works. The creative partnership with his wife resulted in the writing of several plays, including Sweethearts and Wives, which was staged at Wyndham’s Theatre.

Graham Brack hails from Sunderland and met his wife Gillian in Aberdeen where they were both studying pharmacy. After their degrees Gillian returned to Cornwall and Graham followed. This is now called stalking but in 1978 it was termed “romantic”. They have two children and three grandchildren. Gillian and Graham now live in Northamptonshire. Graham’s foray into crime writing began in 2010 when he entered the Crime Writers’ Association’s Debut Dagger competition and was highly commended for Lying and Dying (previously titled The Outrageous Behaviour of Left-Handed Dwarves), in which the world was introduced to Lieutenant Josef Slonský of the Czech Police. Slaughter and Forgetting followed. Both have been re-published by Sapere Books along with another four in the series, Death on Duty, Field of Death, A Second Death and Laid in Earth In 2014 and 2016 Graham was shortlisted for the Debut Dagger again. The earlier novel, Death in Delft (previously titled The Allegory of Art and Science), is set in 17th century Delft and features the philosophy lecturer and reluctant detective Master Mercurius. Sapere Books published it in 2020.

Get in touch 

You can get in touch with Graham on his website.

Graham Ley was born in north London into a family of journalist and writers, and started to read popular fiction when he was a teenager, picking up on regency romance from his mother, the Sapere author Alice Chetwynd Ley. After a career spent teaching theatre in London and overseas, Graham ended up happily in Devon twenty five years ago, close to where his grandmother grew up. Since then, he has also spent much time in Brittany with his family, getting to know and love the region and its history. When he decided to write The Baron Returns, he chose to set his story in 1795, at the time of the rebellion in Brittany against the revolutionary regime of Republican France. Intrigue, love and danger, and the clash of conflicting patriotisms are the subject of this first novel. With the novels of his mother in mind, to whom The Baron Returns is dedicated, he has created a determined heroine who will not believe the suspicions surrounding the man she loves, and a hero who through hardship and survival has to decide where his loyalties lie. Graham has previously written children’s stories, and is now delighted to be back in the atmosphere in which he grew up.

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You can check out Graham's Facebook page or website here.

Henry Denham was born in Harrow on 9 September 1897, the son of Henry Mangles Denham and Helen Clara Lowndes. He married Estelle Margaret Sibbald Currie in 1924, with whom he had one son and two daughters. He entered the Royal Naval Colleges at Osborne and Dartmouth, 1910. He served as a Midshipman in the battleship HMS Agamemnon, 1914-15, and later the destroyer HMS Racoon, and saw action during the Dardanelles campaign, 1915. He was sent by the Admiralty on a year's course at Magdalene College, Cambridge, 1919. He served in the cruiser HMS Renown, 1920, during the Prince of Wales' trip to Australia and New Zealand; the Rhine flotilla, commanding a small armed motor launch; and the battleship HMS Centurion in the Mediterranean. He spent a brief period in Austria in order to learn German. He was Divisional Officer in the boys' training ship HMS Impregnable at Devonport, 1924-6, and then Flag Lieutenant to Admiral Sir Osmond Brock at Portsmouth. From 1927 he spent five years in the Mediterranean in HMS Queen Elizabeth and HMS Warsprite. He was a student at the Staff College, 1935, promoted Commander, and commanded HMS Penelope, 1936-9. He joined Naval Intelligence at the Admiralty, 1939, where he created an Information Section. He was appointed Naval Attaché in Copenhagen, Denmark, 1940, but returned to London later that year when the Germans occupied Denmark. He was then posted as Naval Attaché in Stockholm, Sweden, 1940. He alerted the Admiralty to the movement of the Bismarck and the Prinz Eugen into the Atlantic in May 1941. He retired from the Navy in 1947. He was a keen sailor and after his retirement he pursued a career as a travel writer, producing a series of sea guides. He died in London on 15 July 1993. He was awarded the CMG, 1945.

Helen Cathcart was a prolific writer about the Royal Family, who enjoyed enormous success with her books in the 1960s and 1970s. These emerged with regularity, sold well and were largely enjoyed (if not always at Buckingham Palace). One mystery surrounded the author - she was never seen. Occasionally journalists visited her agent, Harold Albert at his cottage near Liphook, and suspected that Helen Cathcart did not exist. Invariably they left less convinced. Only when Harold Albert died was it revealed - in an obituary written by Hugo Vickers - that Harold Albert and Helen Cathcart were one and the same.

Herbert M. Schiller, M.D. was a historian of the South who authored and edited several well-received books and articles about the Civil War. He practised medicine in North Carolina.

Major General Hubert Essame, CBE, DSO, MC (24 December 1896 – 2 March 1976) was a British Army officer who fought in the First and Second World Wars. He was also a military lecturer, historian and broadcaster. Born on 24 December 1896, Hubert Essame was the son of Ernest H. Essame of Wokingham. He was educated at Nottingham High School. Following his retirement from the army, Essame worked as a military historian. He was a lecturer in military history at King's College London, and published several books and articles. He was also an advisor to television producers for military programmes.

Ian Mackersey was a New Zealand writer and documentary film producer acclaimed for his deeply researched and revelational biographies. His first, published in London in 1985, and still in print, was the life of L T C (Tom) Rolt, the prolific author and pioneer of the leisure cruising industry on Britain’s inland waterways. He was inspired to write the book and research Rolt’s life from his own love of the English canals which he and his family regularly cruised in their own narrow beam boat from its home port in a London suburb. The first of his aviation biographies, Jean Batten: The Garbo of the Skies (1991), was a finalist for two New Zealand book awards. The story of the most reckless, successful and secretive of the celebrated long-distance women aviators of the 1930s, the biography – and a TV documentary Mackersey directed – revealed for the first time the truth about the sad and reclusive life of this glamorous woman pilot, solving in the process the mystery of her bizarre death in 1982. In 1999 Ian Mackersey produced Smithy, the first fully definitive biography of the legendary Australian pilot, Sir Charles Kingsford Smith, whose disappearance over the Indian Ocean in 1935 remains one of aviation’s great unsolved mysteries. It was followed in 2003 by a new study of the life of the American bicyclemakers who invented the aeroplane: The Wright Brothers: The Remarkable Story of the Aviation Pioneers who Changed the World. Both the Jean Batten and Wright Brothers biographies have sold international film rights. His latest book, No Empty Chairs, due for publication in 2012, is the story of the pilots and observers who fought in the Royal Flying Corps in the First Great Air War. A former head of film and television production at British Airways in London, where his documentaries took 24 international awards, Ian Mackersey is an ex-pilot, journalist, magazine editor, TV documentary producer and the author of ten books, including two novels. He began his writing career as a reporter on daily newspapers in New Zealand before going to London to work in Fleet Street and later as a feature writer for Royal Air Force Review, travelling the world reporting on the RAF’s global operations. There followed a year in Hong Kong as night news editor of the South China Morning Post, the editorship, back at the Air Ministry in London, of the RAF’s flying training magazine, Air Clues, and, later, a move to Central Africa. In Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) he edited a monthly magazine for a copper mining group and established a documentary film unit in newly independent Zambia. His most successful film, Luapula Journey, which was accepted by the Edinburgh Festival and has remained a cult movie throughout Central Africa for more than 40 years, was a portrayal of a week in the life of a Zambian fish trader; the simple story unfolded entirely in the local Bemba language – with an English commentary for European audiences. Another of his films, Snow on the Equator, featured an expedition he made into the Ruwenzori, the fabled Mountains of the Moon on the Congo/Uganda border. Back in London Mackersey joined the public affairs department of British Airways (then BOAC) to manage its film, television and photographic operations, during which time he wrote and produced for world-wide television documentaries about airline operations, including three about the supersonic airliner Concorde. In 1983 he returned to live and work again in New Zealand where, in Auckland, he and his wife, Caroline, a former BBC-TV researcher, started a film production company to make documentary programmes for TVNZ. After writing, directing and producing several acclaimed and incisive documentaries, he turned to full-time writing in the early 1990s, travelling the world researching his books for his London publisher. In April 2015, after a short illness, Ian Mackersey passed away in Auckland. He is survived by three children; David, Paula and Kiri. Should you wish to make contact regarding their father's work, please email Paula Mackersey here.

Irving A. Greenfield (22 February 1928–1 April 2020) was a humanities professor and the prolific author of over 300 novels. He was born in Brooklyn, New York and graduated from Brooklyn College in 1950. He spent two years in the Merchant Marine and served as an Infantryman during the Korean War. He was later awarded a PhD for his work in fiction. His novel, The Ancient of Days, was a best-seller for six weeks while Tagget was made into a film for TV.

With a double whammy of history genes from her English mum and Swiss/German dad, Isolde Martyn loves researching the past. She grew up in London and completed a History Honours Degree at the University of Exeter with a specialisation in Yorkist England. Not surprisingly, five of her novels have been set in the fifteenth century and most of her books deal with political intrigue surrounding real historical people. She is an international award-winning writer and the author of eight historical novels and a history picture book for children. Her earlier career was in academia and publishing and she was a senior book editor with a major publishing company before taking up writing full-time. These days she is based in Sydney, married to a retired geologist who is also a published author, and they enjoy the company of three water dragons and a family of owls.

J. C. Briggs taught English for many years in schools in Cheshire, Hong Kong and Lancashire. She now lives in a cottage in Cumbria. The Murder of Patience Brooke is the first novel featuring Charles Dickens as a detective and his partner, Superintendent Sam Jones of Bow Street. The idea of Dickens as a detective came about when she read Dickens’s articles about the London police in his periodical Household Words. Dickens was fascinated by police investigation and by murder, in particular – there are plenty of murderers in his writing, and Dickens is credited with the creation of the first literary detective in Inspector Bucket who solves the murder of Mr Tulkinghorn in Bleak House. The second in the series is Death at Hungerford Stairs (2015), and the third, Murder by Ghostlight, set in Manchester and London, was published in 2016.

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You can check out J. C. Briggs's website or follow her on X and Facebook.

J. L. McWilliams is a prairie-born-and-bred Canadian, growing up in Moose Jaw and on the family farm in Saskatchewan. He joined the Canadian Army a day after his eighteenth birthday, intending to serve as a piper in The Black Watch, but somehow ended up as a tank officer. Back to civilian life he eventually turned to teaching high school and pipe bands for thirty years. Beside his family, piping, and exploring the world, history has always been his passion. This array of interests led him into a writing career. J. L. McWilliams is the co-author of three books on the First World War, The Suicide Battalion, Gas! The Battle for Ypres, 1915, and Amiens: Dawn of Victory, published in Britain as Amiens 1918: The Last Great Battle. He is also the creator of The MacHugh Memoirs, a series of seven historical-adventure novels based on a Canadian adventurer, Rory MacHugh in the early 1800’s. One, A Secret of the Sphinx, was a finalist in the Global Book of Excellence Awards.

Jacquie Rogers was born in the UK and grew up in Australia. She lingered abroad in various countries for a long time before returning to Britain, where she worked in advertising and later as a university researcher and senior lecturer, before turning to writing. She is the author of two crime-thriller series, both set in third century Roman Britain. Her continuing Quintus Valerius mysteries include the bestselling The Loyal Centurion. Her new Otto Cornelius series for Sapere Books begins with The Silver Mirror. In 2020 and 2021 she was Runner-Up in the Lincoln Book Festival story competition. Her short stories have appeared in several crime and historical anthologies. Jacquie lives in the Malvern Hills of England. She travels a lot by motorbike, and haunts cafés and pubs.

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Jacquie’s Substack newsletter, YouTube channel, magazine articles and social media can all be accessed from Linktree.

Tennessee native James A. Crutchfield is the author of fifty books, including volumes on various aspects of American history, biography, and general interest subjects. He is the 2011 recipient of the Western Writers of America (WWA) Owen Wister Award for Lifetime Achievement in Western Literature. Over the years James has also received a Spur Award, three Stirrup Awards, and the Branding Iron Award from WWA, as well as two commendation awards from the American Association for State and Local History (AASLH).

Having published successfully as an indie author Jane Cable joined Sapere Books in 2018. The timing was perfect because the year before she and her husband fulfilled their dream of moving to Cornwall and, despite the obvious distractions of surf, sand and the great outdoors, she was able to become a full time writer. Jane writes contemporary romance with a twist of mystery and a glance back over the shoulder at the past. More than anything she is inspired by a place, delving back into its history to find stories which resonate with her modern characters – and her readers – alike. After two standalone contemporary romances looking back to World War Two, Jane has now embarked on writing a series of dual time mysteries, Cornish Echoes, each one set in the Poldark era and the present day and based around one of Cornwall’s great Regency houses. A member of the Romantic Novelists’ Association, Jane also writes women’s fiction as Eva Glyn. She is commissioning editor of Frost online magazine.

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You can get in touch with Jane on her website or follow her on X.

Jean Overton Fuller (7 March 1915–8 April 2009) was a British author best known for her book Madeleine, the story of Noor Inayat Khan, an Allied SOE agent during the Second World War.

Jean Stubbs (23 October 1926–19 October 2012) was born in Lancashire. Even as a small child she made up stories and plays – her younger brother a captive audience and ‘bit part player’. Jean’s book writing began with The Rose Grower, published in 1962. She lived in London for over twenty years, thriving on city life and later its publishing world. Her writings included innumerable short stories for magazines and collections, some of which have been adapted for radio. She also ran seminars and discussion groups at writers' summer schools and was appointed for a year as writer-in-residence for Avon. Her books include three Victorian-set crime novels featuring the charismatic Inspector Lintott, and she also based some of her fiction on historical figures like Henry VII. She was mostly published in the UK by Macmillan and by St Martins Press in the US. In 1975 Jean moved to Cornwall with her husband, to live in a small stone cottage on the Lizard peninsula – a sea change. Once more Jean’s creativity responded to her surroundings. This very different Cornish life inspired a number of books, several set in Cornwall, and the four novels comprising The Brief Chronicles, set during the industrial age. Her final novel – I’m a Stranger Here Myself – was published in 2004.

Jeff Jones has written five heroic fantasy novels and over two hundred short ghost stories, many of which have won prizes, but his passion has always been historical fiction, specifically Roman and World War One. His Legion of the Damned Roman Thrillers are action-packed, authentic historical military adventures set in Ancient Rome. He was born on the south coast of England but has steadily been working his way north via a series of unfortunate events which would make Lemony Snicket blush. He now resides in rural Norfolk where he works as a freelance editor and proofreader. As his own boss, he hopes he can now finally settle down and concentrate on his writing. When he is not at his desk writing or working, he can usually be found riding his bike in the beautiful Norfolk countryside whilst thinking about plot twists or pottering around antique centres reliving his distant youth.

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You can get in touch with Jeff on his website or follow him on Facebook.

After obtaining a degree in history and secondary education at Brigham Young University, Jennifer taught history and government to her favourite group of people: teenagers. Her love of telling stories took her back to school, where she received an MFA in creative writing at Anglia Ruskin University. While in Cambridge, she began work on her first book, When the Yanks Came, a middle grade historical fiction novel inspired by her research as an undergrad. Jennifer has long held a deep respect and love for the unheralded work of women and children during wartime. Her series with Sapere Books will focus on the silent yet essential labour of the female codebreakers at Bletchley Park. There's nothing Jennifer loves more than eating an entire chocolate pie, taking an afternoon nap with her cat, or cantering on a horse. She lives in Provo, Utah with her partner and four boys, where she finds solace in the shadows of the Wasatch Mountains. You can learn more about Jennifer and her love of history and fiction on her website or her Instagram.

Jenny Glanfield was born in Worcestershire but her father’s work meant that her family moved frequently during her childhood. She studied French and German at school and college and her first job was in Germany, after which she lived and worked in Paris, Austria and Italy, where she met her first husband Colin, a photographer and photo-historian. They lived in Kent and Jenny’s jobs in London used her German language skills. However, her long-term ambition had always been to be a writer and following a particularly arduous work trip to Germany, she identified the book inside her waiting to be written. That book eventually turned into a trilogy, spanning over a century of tumultuous German history, its setting the fictitious, prestigious Hotel Quadriga next to Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate, and charting the lives of its owners and guests over several generations. She went on to write two more novels, Portraits In An Album and The Cuckoo Wood, while also helping to run Colin’s photographic studio in London as his health deteriorated. Following his death, she eventually moved to an old cottage in West Somerset where she met her second husband, Tony. She taught a creative writing course for several years, and continues to enjoy the luxuries of gardening, walking and reading voraciously.

John Adair is one of the world’s leading authorities on leadership and leadership development. Over a million managers worldwide have taken part in the Action-Centred Leadership programmes he pioneered. John has had a colourful early career. He served as a platoon commander in the Scots Guards in Egypt, and then became the only national serviceman to serve in the Arab Legion, where he became adjutant of a Bedouin regiment. After national service he qualified as a deckhand in Hull and worked on an arctic trawler in Iceland waters. He then worked as a hospital orderly in the operating theatre of a hospital. After being senior lecturer in military history and adviser in leadership training at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, and Associate Director of The Industrial Society, in 1979 John became the world’s first Professor of Leadership Studies at the University of Surrey.  

Lieutenant-General Sir John Bagot Glubb, KCB, CMG, DSO, OBE, MC, KStJ, KPM (16 April 1897–17 March 1986), known as Glubb Pasha (Arabic: كلوب باشا; and known as Abu Hunaik by the Jordanians), was a British military officer who led and trained Transjordan's Arab Legion between 1939 and 1956 as its commanding general. During the First World War, he served in France.

John Bowle (19 December 1905–17 September 1985) was educated at Marlborough and Balliol College, Oxford, where he was a Brackenbury Scholar. He was a history master at Westminster and later at Eton. From 1947 to 1949 he was Lecturer in Modern History at Wadham College, Oxford, and from 1950 to 1967 he was Professor of Political Theory at the College d’Europe, Bruges. He also became a visiting professor at important American universities. He was a Leverhulme Research Fellow from 1949 to 1950 and won an Arts Council Prize in 1966. He has written many history books, including Western Political Thought, Politics and Opinion in the 19th Century, Henry VIII, The English Experience and The Imperial Achievement. He was also editor of A Concise Encyclopaedia of World History, of which the revised edition was published in 1971.

David John James (30 November 1923–2 October 1993) was a Welsh author of historical novels. He studied philosophy at St David's University College, Lampeter, and also read and completed a BA (converted to an MA) in psychology at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He became a psychologist for the Ministry of Defence, lecturing on the selection and training of air crews for the RAF at Brampton. He is known for writing four historical novels set in early medieval Britain and Europe. His skilful evocation of life and myths of Dark Age Europe won him the admiration of neo-pagan authors John and Caitlin Matthews. His Victorian Maritime Adventures feature Lieutenant Thomas Talleyman and are stuffed to the gunwales with authentic detail of nineteenth-century seafaring.

John Wingate DSC (1920–2008) was a successful novelist with some twenty-five books to his credit. Many of these had a naval theme. Frequently involving the submarine service, they gained much authenticity from his personal wartime experiences. John was in the Battle of the Channel in a Chasseur and was mentioned in Dispatches. He then went into submarines based in the Mediterranean in Malta. He and his crew survived a 36-hour dive while being depth-charged, for which he was awarded the DSC. This was thought to be impossible at that time because of the build-up of carbon dioxide. After the war he went into market gardening until he was recalled to the Navy for the Korean Crisis in 1951. After that he started teaching in Sussex, and then at Aysgarth Preparatory School near Bedale in Yorkshire. He taught there for three years and then went to Milton Abbey School in Dorset until he was asked to start Hampshire Activities Centre at Calshot. This was the first of its kind, and was a great success. It was opened by Prince Philip. On retirement he took up writing full time, eventually moving to France.

John Winton (3 May 1931–27 April 2001) was an English author and obituarist, following a career in the Royal Navy in which he rose to Lieutenant-Commander. He was born in London and served in the Korean War and during the Suez Crisis. Whilst still in the Navy, he wrote the comic novel We Joined the Navy, featuring the character of 'The Artful Bodger'. Several other novels and a number of non-fiction works on naval subjects followed, including a biography of Admiral John Jellicoe, 1st Earl Jellicoe. John also served for fourteen years as an obituarist for The Daily Telegraph.

John Wooldridge, DSO, DFC & Bar, DFM (18 July 1919–27 October 1958) was born in Yokohoma, Japan. Educated at St Paul’s School, London, his first job was as secretary to a boys’ preparatory school in Norfolk. All his spare time was spent flying with the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve and studying music. In April 1938 Wooldridge transferred to the regular Air Force as a Sergeant Pilot, getting past the age of admission rule by claiming that he was born in 1917. He took part in the British air raid on Kiel in September 1939, the first raid of the Second World War, and having brought his damaged aircraft home safely, he was awarded the Distinguished Flying Medal. Commissioned in August 1940, he rapidly rose to the rank of Flight Commander, flying Lancasters as a Flight Lieutenant. In 1942, for his part in the 1,000 bomber raid on Cologne, he was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross. In March 1943, Wooldridge was appointed Commanding Officer of No. 105 Squadron, which specialised in low-level precision daylight bombing using de Havilland Mosquito aircraft. His book, Low Attack, is a vivid account of two Mosquito squadrons which revolutionised aerial warfare.

After completing his PhD in Classics, Julian Barr became a teacher, hated being called ‘sir,’ and dived into storytelling. Based in Brisbane, Australia, he writes fantasy with a strong mythological and historical flavour. His previous books include the Ashes of Olympus trilogy, the Viking-inspired Tooth and Blade and the high fantasy World Breaker. An avid comic book fan, he co-writes the ongoing series Slayhemn. In 2024, Julian won Sapere Books’ competition and received a five-book publishing deal for a series based on the Arthurian legend. As an academic, Julian taught undergraduate courses on Greco-Roman history and mythology. Mostly this consisted of doing his best minotaur impression on demand. Julian now edits fiction on a freelance basis and works for the publishing arm of Signum University, where he also teaches creative writing. During his travels in Europe, he has been known to wander around Roman ruins while munching on jammy dodgers. His scholarly research includes publications on Roman medicine, early Christianity and the gastronomic habits of centaurs, but he prefers to think of himself as an itinerant bard. Julian’s books combine his love of myth and magic with gritty historical detail. His books tend to explore the nature of heroism and the making of legends. When he’s not perusing texts in dead languages, Julian enjoys rainforest hiking and running RPG adventures.

Justin Fox is a novelist, travel writer and photographer based in Cape Town. He was until recently a photojournalist (and subsequently editor) of Getaway, South Africa’s leading travel magazine, and has spent the past two decades travelling the length and breadth of Africa writing and photographing for the publication. Justin was a Rhodes Scholar and received a doctorate in English from Oxford University (1995) after which he became a research fellow at the University of Cape Town, where he still teaches part-time. His articles have appeared internationally in a number of publications and on a wide range of topics including travel, literature, history, nature and art, while his short stories and poems have appeared in various anthologies. He has written twenty books, mostly non-fiction, and been published in South Africa, the USA, UK, Holland and France. Recent titles include the Jack Pembroke Naval Thriller series: authentic British Navy war stories set during the Second World War. Justin is a two-time Mondi journalism award winner and has been longlisted for the Olive Schreiner Prize for literature, the Alan Paton Award for non-fiction and the Etisalat Prize for African literature. Get in touch Check out Justin's website or follow him on Instagram, Facebook and X.

Kate Dunn comes from a long line of writers and actors: her great-great-grandfather Hugh Williams was a Welsh chartist who published revolutionary poetry, her grandfather, another Hugh Williams, was a celebrated film star and playwright, and she is the niece of the poet Hugo Williams and the actor Simon Williams. Kate has acted in repertory, toured around Britain, the Far and Middle East and appeared in three West End plays, as well as a number of television productions. She has a PhD in Drama from Manchester University. Following the birth of her son she turned to writing and has since had six books published, including Rebecca’s Children and The Line Between Us. Get in touch You can check out Kate's other books on her website, or follow her on X and Bluesky.

From a family of writers, Kate has always been surrounded by books. She first fell in love with the Tudors through Shakespeare, Ancient Rome through her Latin teachers, and Victorian and Anglo-Saxon England through her brother’s hand-me-down Sherlock Holmes and Tolkien books. She wrote her first book at age fourteen about a female pilot trying to join an elite flying club in Dover in the aftermath of World War II. Kate spent over twenty years working in climate policy with the U.S. Government and non-profits. She now happily devotes her time to telling stories that have been forgotten in the dusty corners of history. She is currently working on a Tudor suspense series centred on her thirteenth great-grandmother, a lady in Queen Elizabeth I’s court. She holds a B.A. in History from the University of Texas at Austin, an M. Phil in Comparative Politics from the University of Glasgow, and an M.A. in International Relations from Johns Hopkins University. She has lived in England, Scotland, Washington, DC, Italy, and Montana. A native Texan, she now lives in northern California with her daughter and two rescue cats. You can get in touch with Kate on her website or follow her on Instagram.

Keith Moray was born in St Andrews and studied medicine at the University of Dundee in Scotland. He now lives in England, within arrow-shot of the ruins of a medieval castle, which features in his historical murder mystery series set in Yorkshire. He is a part-time doctor, medical journalist and novelist, writing in several genres. He writes historical fiction and crime as Keith Moray, non-fiction as Keith Souter and Westerns as Clay More. Curiously, his medical background finds its way into most of his writing. He is a member of various writers’ organisations, including the Crime Writers’ Association, Medical Journalists Association, International Thriller Writers, Western Writers of America and a past vice-president of Western Fictioneers, a professional organisation of Western writers. In his spare time, Keith enjoy the movies, theatre and making bread. He plays golf, tennis and runs at carthorse speed. As a frustrated actor, he has found occasional solace as a supporting artist, but enough said about that! Keith lives in West Yorkshire in England with his wife Rachel and whichever of his children and grandchildren happen to pop home.

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You can check out Keith's website or follow him on Facebook and X.

Kim Fleet holds an MA and PhD in Social Anthropology and spent five years living and working in Australian Aboriginal communities, helping indigenous people gain access to their traditional country. This experience informed several of her short stories and her novels Sacred Site and Featherfoot, which are set in the Australian Outback. She has been writing since the age of nine, when her father gave her a book called Write Your Own Novel. Over eighty of her short stories have appeared in magazines in the UK and Australia, including People's Friend, Woman's Weekly, Take a Break and That's Life Fast Fiction. She has won or been shortlisted in over twenty literary competitions, including the Asham Award.

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Kim welcomes visitors to her website.

Laura is passionate about using fiction to restore the voices of people who have been obscured by the traditional historical narratives. She is writing a new series about forgotten medieval women, with the first novel exploring the life and legacy of Mary de Bohun, and her enduring influence over her husband Henry Bolingbroke (later Henry IV). She studied late Medieval England and France at Oxford University, with a particular focus on the Wars of the Roses. She is an alumna of Curtis Brown Creative’s Writing Your Novel Course and was mentored by the historical novelist Suzannah Dunn. She lives in North London with her husband, son and two cats. Writing is her happy place and has helped her cope with thyroid cancer. Follow Laura on X @LauraAKarim. She writes daily 'on this day' posts about medieval history, castles, forgotten women and Richard III.

Laura Martin writes historical mystery and romance set predominantly in the Georgian era. She has written more than twenty historical romances, her books have been translated into ten different languages and are sold worldwide. When not writing, Laura spends her time working as a doctor in Cambridgeshire where she lives with her husband and two young sons. She has a love of history and travel and draws on the places she visits for inspiration in her writing. She is currently working on her Jane Austen Investigations series – thrilling Regency-era murder mysteries featuring a tenacious young Jane Austen.

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You can get in touch with Laura on her website or follow her on X, Facebook and Instagram.

Born in New Bedford, Massachusetts, Len Levinson served on active duty in the U.S. Army from 1954–1957, and graduated from Michigan State University with a BA in Social Science. He relocated to NYC that year and worked as an advertising copywriter and public relations executive before becoming a full-time novelist. Len created and wrote a number of series, including The Apache Wars Saga, The Pecos Kid and The Rat Bastards. He has had over eighty titles published, and after many years in NYC, Len moved to a small town (population 3,100) in rural Illinois, where he is now surrounded by corn and soybean fields ... a peaceful, ideal location for a writer.

Leo Heaps (1923–1995) was born in Winnipeg, Canada and lived in California, England and finally in Toronto. His early years were in the shadow of his father, a famous Parliamentarian, followed by his service in the British 1st Airborne during the Second World War, where he was awarded the Military Cross. His post-war exploits took him to the War of Independence in Israel, where he trained members of the Israeli army, and finally to the Hungarian revolution where he he worked with the International Rescue Committee. In civilian life, he had an unbridled passion for adventure, fine artwork and writing, all of which played important roles in his various published works. An accomplished ocean sailor and tennis player, he always made time for these two pursuits, while still attending obscure auctions, where he uncovered several rare works of art. His various exploits produced life-long relationships with a fascinating array of colleagues from all walks of life, many of them becoming the basis for characters in some of his published works.

Euphrasia Emmeline Cox  (1889–1983) wrote under the name of Lewis Cox. She was born in South Wales, the second of six children – four girls and two boys – to Jonathan and Laurette Lewis. Both parents died when she was quite young and the family was rather left to look after themselves. The youngest sibling, Leonard, was killed in 1917, aged 19, in the Somme and his name can be found on the Menin Gate in Ypres. She married William Lewis Cox from Dunmanway, County Cork, in 1913 at St George’s, Hanover Square and their only child, Euphrasia Joan ('Tam') was born on 4 August 1914. For most of their married life they lived at various addresses in central London, except for a short period when they rented Chawton House in Hampshire, the home of the Knight family, where Jane Austen wrote her novels. When William died in 1946, Euphrasia lived with her daughter Tam (who had married Cecil Playford in 1939) and their family until she died in 1983. She wrote over 250 novels all in longhand; she started her career in the late 1920s and continued writing well into her eighties. She wrote under the names of Lewis Cox, Bridget Parsons and Mary Blair, and her books were published, primarily, by Hutchinson, Mills & Boon and later, Robert Hale. They were available in many countries and translated into several languages, including Japanese and Dutch. In her writing, as in life, she was very disciplined and forthright with a strong will and high standards; not outgoing with few friends, she did not seek publicity, but enjoyed her success and, whilst not a traveller, it is perhaps true that she lived through her imagination. She loved antiques and enjoyed collecting furniture and pictures. It is fair to say that she was not an easy person to live with but one cannot help but admire all that she achieved, particularly at a time when women were expected to be in the background – hence her using the name Lewis Cox – and during the war; judging by the cuttings she was very highly thought of and had good reviews and billing.

Linda Stratmann's love affair with the printed word started when she was two, when her mother, a keen reader, taught her the alphabet. She has had her nose in a book ever since. By her teens, she had developed an absorbing and enduring interest in true crime and history and a special fascination for the Victorian era. 2003 saw the launch of her first published book, Chloroform: The Quest for Oblivion. Several true crime books were to follow, including The Secret Poisoner, a study of nineteenth century poison murder, and three biographies, including The Greatest Rogue in England, charting the outrageously debauched life of Colonel Francis Charteris. Linda's first fiction series, the Frances Doughty Mysteries set in 1880s Bayswater, features a clever and determined lady detective. Through her adventures, Frances explores aspects of Victorian life such as diet, education, medicine, women’s rights, fear of premature burial and the fashion for cycling. In her second series, set in 1870s Brighton, Mina Scarletti is a deceptively diminutive lady who writes horror stories and exposes the activities of fraudulent spirit mediums. Linda's most recent series, The Early Casebook of Sherlock Holmes, follows a young Holmes as he employs his powers of deduction to discover the truth behind some fiendish mysteries. Linda is delighted to be an active member of the Crime Writers’ Association, and was elected Vice-Chair in 2017. Get in touch You can get in touch with Linda on her website or follow her on Facebook, X and Instagram. See a full list of Linda’s books on Goodreads. Sign up to her newsletter to hear about Linda's news and exclusive content.

Lynne Reid Banks (31 July 1929–4 April 2024) was the author of ten acclaimed adult novels as well as many much-loved books for children.

She was born in London, the only child of a Scottish doctor and an Irish actress. During the Second World War she was evacuated to the prairies of Canada where she spent five years. After studying at RADA in the late 1940’s she became an actress and later joined ITN to become one of the first women TV news reporters in Britain. Her first novel, The L-Shaped Room, was published in 1960 and caused outrage in more conservative quarters for its portrayal of a an unmarried mother-to-be who is thrown out by her father and has to live in the L-shaped room of the title. The novel was later adapted for cinema by the legendary Bryan Forbes and brought great critical acclaim.

In the early 1960's she went to live in a kibbutz in Israel with her husband where she taught English. In 1971 she brought her family back to London where she continued to write for adults and children, including her classic children’s novel The Indian in the Cupboard, which has sold more than ten million copies worldwide and was made into a highly successful feature film.

In 2013 Lynne won the prestigious J.M. Barrie Award ‘in recognition of a lifetime’s achievement in delighting children’.

M. J. Logue (as in cataLOGUE and epiLOGUE and not, ever, loge, which is apparently a kind of private box in a theatre) wrote her first short novel on a manual typewriter aged seven. It wasn't very good, being about talking horses, but she made her parents sit through endless readings of it anyway. Thirty-something years later she is still writing, although horses only come into it occasionally these days. Born and brought up in Lancashire, she moved to Cornwall at the turn of the century (and has always wanted to write that) and now lives in a granite cottage with her husband, son, five cats, and various itinerant wildlife. After periods of employment as a tarot reader, complaints call handler, executive PA, copywriter and civil servant, she decided to start writing historical fiction about the period of British history that fascinates her - the 17th century. Her first series, covering the less than stellar career of a disreputable troop of Parliamentarian cavalry during the civil wars, was acclaimed by reviewers as "historical fiction written with elegance, wit and black humour" - but so many readers wanted to know whether fierce young lieutenant Thankful Russell ever did get his Happy Ever After, that the Thomazine and Major Russell series of romantic thrillers for Sapere Books began.

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M. J. Logue can be found on X, lurking on the web at asweetdisorder.com, and posting photos of cake, cats and extreme embroidery on Instagram.

Marilyn Todd is the award-winning author of sixteen historical thrillers, three anthologies and scores of short stories. Most of these stories are crime, with the others swinging from comic fantasy to commercial women's fiction and all points in between. Two scooped awards from Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, and a third was nominated for a Shamus. She is also a reviewer for the New York Journal of Books. Born in London, she's been killing people for a living since 1995. These days she lives with her husband on a French hilltop, surrounded by vineyards, chateaux and woods, and enjoys cooking.

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You can get in touch with Marilyn on her website.

Ida Cook (24 August 1904–22 December 1986) was a British campaigner for Jewish refugees and a romance novelist as Mary Burchell. Ida and her sister Mary Louise Cook (1901–1991) rescued Jews from the Nazis during the 1930s. The sisters helped twenty-nine people escape, funded mainly by Ida's writing. In 1965, the Cook sisters were honoured as Righteous Among the Nations by the Yad Vashem Martyrs and Heroes Remembrance Authority in Israel. Between 1936 and 1985, Ida wrote 112 romance novels as Mary Burchell for Mills & Boon. She helped to found, and from 1966 to 1986 was the second president of, the Romantic Novelists' Association.

Born in Scotland, reading helped Michael Burr through early years that might have been termed ‘eclectic’, in that if illness or accident beckoned, it beckoned him. Reading Sutcliff, Stevenson, Forester, Trease and Tranter at the behest of teachers who cared enough to recommend ‘something you might like’ got a perennial absentee through a sickly childhood, and lit a fire for the past that eventually found expression in a Master’s degree in History. Training for a teaching career in New Zealand not only taught an impressionable 18-year-old that exhilarating rugby is founded on the holy trinity of possession, position and pace, but added another Master’s in Education during a career that saw him teach all ages, from primary school to university, with a sideline diversion as an inspector of schools. It’s probably axiomatic that a people-centred occupation should lead in retirement to such a people-centred pastime as writing historical fiction, but Michael has never been able to determine whether History is the chicken or the egg in that relationship. However, true happiness came on the day he decided that it really didn’t matter because people — strong, weak, ordinary, extraordinary and just plain peculiar — are at the centre of history’s events, and its stories need to reflect that if they are to be credible. And anyway — remembering the legendary Scottish dislike for waste, why would anyone pass up the beguiling canvas that history has provided down the centuries?

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Visit Michael’s website to stay up to date with his news and latest releases.

Following retirement after thirty-two years as a police officer, working mainly as a detective, Michael Fowler returned to the deadly business of murder, as a writer. His past work brought him into contact with some nasty characters and gruesome cases, and he draws on that experience to craft his stories: there is nothing gentile about the novels he writes. He penned his first DS Hunter Kerr novel in 2010 and  says that writing about Hunter is like writing about himself: “In many ways I am inextricably linked with Hunter Kerr. His career shadows mine to an extent and many of his experiences were mine. South Yorkshire remains a key element in my books. It’s Hunter’s patch and we both know it well.” His Dr Hamlet Mottrell Investigations follow forensic psychologist-turned-detective Dr Hamlet Mottrell as he attempts to solve some sinister murder cases.

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You can follow Michael on X.

Mollie Hardwick (7 March 1916–13 December 2003) was an English author who was best known for writing books that accompanied the TV series Upstairs, Downstairs. She married fellow author Michael Hardwick in 1961 and together they co-wrote numerous books.

Natalie Kleinman came late to writing, but not to reading, and it was her lifelong love of Regency romance that led her to turn from contemporary romantic fiction to try her hand at her favourite genre. She takes delight in creating short stories, of which more than fifty have been published, but is never happier than when immersed in an age of etiquette and manners, fashion and intrigue, all combined into a romping good tale. Natalie is a member of the Romantic Novelists' Association, the Society of Authors and the Society of Women Writers and Journalists.

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You can get in touch with Natalie on her website or follow her on Facebook.

Neil Denby was widely published in the educational field as an academic but, since retiring, has turned his hand to fiction. He lives quietly - at least when the grandchildren are not visiting - in a West Yorkshire village where he divides his time between various voluntary activities and writing. His Quintus Roman Thrillers series are action-packed, authentic historical military adventures set in Ancient Rome.

The main themes of Noel B. Gerson's writing included personalities and events in American history. Among the subjects of his biographies were Sam Houston, Kit Carson and Presidents Andrew Jackson and Theodore Roosevelt. As Dana Fuller Ross, he wrote the popular Wagons West series; as Donald Clayton Porter, he wrote the White Indian series. Two of his novels, 55 Days at Peking and The Naked Maja, were made into movies. Noel B. Gerson, who wrote 325 books of fact and fiction under his own name and several pseudonyms, died at the age of 75 in 1988.

Norman Gladden (1897–1986) was a private in the Northumberland Fusiliers who served in the British Army during the First World War, enlisting in May 1916. He documented his experiences in his diary, which forms the basis for his trilogy of personal accounts: The Somme, 1916, Ypres, 1917, and Across the Piave.

Pat Flower (23 February 1914–2 September 1977) was born in Ramsgate, Kent and moved to Australia with her family in 1928. She originally worked as a secretary, writing radio plays and sketches in her spare time. She eventually moved on to writing crime novels and TV scripts. She wrote so many episodes of the ABC TV series Australian Playhouse that one critic called it "The Pat Flower Show". She was married to Cedric Flower, an actor, costume designer, designer, playwright, director, playwright, producer and set designer.

Following a childhood spent writing her first books, most notably, Our Book about Jesus – a self-help guide for fellow young Catholics, and, The Sleepover – a compelling tale of a midnight feast, shockingly intercepted by fictitious parents with badly drawn hands, Patricia Caliskan always liked to play with words. Patricia first saw her name misspelt in print aged 17, interviewing hungover rock stars and illegible actors for an Arts and Entertainment magazine. After graduating from the University of Liverpool, Patricia joined Trinity Mirror Newsgroup, working as editor across a portfolio of lifestyle magazine titles. Patricia likes a good pair of boots, wearing perfume with her pyjamas, and laughter. Lots of laughter. Because without it life feels far too grown up for her liking. Told with mischievous humour, Patricia’s stories explore family dynamics, office politics, and the divergent roles of women throughout their lives.

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You can get in touch with Patricia on her website or follow her on Instagram, X or Goodreads.

Patrick worked in advertising for many years with some of the most globally recognised agencies and brands. He’d go as far as saying that he doubts there is anyone in the UK that hasn’t seen some of his work. Before that, he served in military intelligence, was educated in Scotland and now describes himself as a Dorset Highlander. He is the mixed heritage son of two diplomats and as a result has lived in over twenty countries around the world. Patrick has always been fascinated by history, particularly military history, and spurred on by the time on his hands during two lockdowns, he took to writing stories. To date, he has completed two stand-alone supernatural historical novels, one about past lives and the other about the ghosts haunting a military cemetery. The latter was long-listed for the inaugural Morley Prize for unpublished authors of colour. His Jox McNabb Aviation Thriller series follows the adventures a young RAF pilot during the Second World War.

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You can get in touch with Patrick on his website or follow him on X and Bluesky.

Paul lives in a small town in the northern Home Counties. Having worked in universities and run his own business in the past, his time is now split between writing, teaching creative writing, and serving on the board of an educational trust. Paul writes historical fiction. He inherited his love of history and historical fiction from his mother, who was an avid member of the Richard III Society. The William Constable series of historical thrillers includes real characters and events in late sixteenth-century England. He has also written a novel set at the Paris Peace Conference at the end of World War I. Most of his writing takes place in a shed at the bottom of his garden, where he can avoid the distractions of dogs, grandchildren, and DIY projects. Research for historical fiction usually takes longer than the writing, but it can also be fun, especially when visiting sites of historic interest. In addition to teaching creative writing at an adult education college, Paul organises a couple of writers' support groups. Read more about Paul on his website.

Vice Admiral Sir Peter William Gretton KCB, DSO**, OBE, DSC (27 August 1912–11 November 1992) was an officer in the Royal Navy. He was active in the Battle of the Atlantic during the Second World War, and was a successful convoy escort commander. He eventually rose to become Fifth Sea Lord and retired as a Vice Admiral before entering university life as a bursar and academic.

Brigadier Peter Young, DSO, MC & Two Bars (28 July 1915–13 September 1988) was a British Army officer who, during the Second World War, served with distinction with the British Commandos. Subsequently, he commanded a regiment of the Arab Legion, then returned to England in staff appointments. In 1959 he retired from the army as a brigadier and became head of Military History at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. In 1968, following the publication of Young’s Edgehill 1642, he founded The Sealed Knot, a Civil War historical re-enactment society. He also went on to become a well-known military historian and author.

Philip Purser (28 August 1925–1 August 2022) saw army service in the final days of the Second World War and in occupied Germany before toying with the idea of becoming an engineer. Journalism claimed him instead, first in Scotland and then Fleet Street. He was perhaps best known as the long-serving television critic for the Sunday Telegraph, but apart from novels he  also wrote television dramas, radio plays and biographies. His thriller Lights in the Sky, first published in 2005, was a "rather belated" follow-up to Night of Glass. His thrillers are all marked by skilful, unfussy storytelling and a blend of suspense and farce similar to early Hitchcock, where unheroic characters are forced by circumstances to perform very heroic deeds.

When she isn’t making clothes or wrangling dogs, Pippa Elliott time-travels to the nineteenth century (as a reader and author). Pippa started writing seriously after a school reunion, when classmates were surprised she had become a veterinarian, rather than an author! Apparently, her stories always held the class spellbound; something she had forgotten. The nineteenth century is Pippa’s passion. She fell in love with the Victorians at her Granny’s house, in a Yorkshire coal-mining village. This two-up-two-down had such wonderous features as a pantry, coal bunker, cast-iron range, and gas lights. Those glimpses of Victorian life triggered an interest that has become an obsession. Pippa has a special interest in the history of pet-keeping, has lectured on the social history of cats, and writes non-fiction articles for various publications including The Veterinary Times. As for fiction, Pippa authors cosy historical mysteries as the perfect antidote to the modern world. Calling upon her medical knowledge, Pippa approaches writing a mystery with the same logic used to make a clinical diagnosis: list the suspects, assemble the evidence, and unmask the killer. You can follow Pippa via Instagram, her website, and her newsletter.

R M Cullen was born in Dublin and brought up in Australia and then England, she has now found her way back to Ireland and is enjoying the coastal scenery and friendly welcome in North Wexford. Following degrees in History from the Universities of Manchester and Keele, she pursued a career in the theatre, including as a puppeteer, and then began to write plays for companies such as the RSC, Contact Theatre and numerous community and theatre-in-education projects. After completing a Masters degree in Scriptwriting she wrote for film and TV and taught scriptwriting at Bournemouth University. In recent years she has concentrated on writing prose, with short stories published in anthologies and online journals, and independently published novels. Her Richard Brinsley Sheridan Mysteries are 18th century crime thrillers set in London at a time of Revolution.

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You can get in touch with R M Cullen on her website or follow her on Facebook.

Raymond Wemmlinger has been studying the Tudors for many years, with a particular interest in untold or overlooked stories, especially about royal women, and their ambitions for themselves and their children. His skills as a historian were cultivated in 19th century British and American theater through his career of thirty-seven years as Curator and Librarian of The Players Foundation for Theater Education at The Players in New York City, and as a novelist in his 2007 historical novel Booth’s Daughter, about the family struggles of the only child of the famous tragedian Edwin Booth. Raymond has spent all his life in or around New York City, where he earned degrees in English Literature from Pace University and Librarianship from Pratt Institute. He lives in New Jersey with his family and Golden Retriever. The Queen’s Rival, a biographical historical novel of Lady Margaret Clifford, is the first in his Tudor Royals Series for Sapere Books.

Rebecca Jenkins was born into history and never recovered. Her first home was a fifteenth-century college house in Oxford High Street with the red and white roses of the War of the Roses carved over the door. In her early teens she was such a fan of Baroness D’Orczy’s Scarlet Pimpernel that she took up fencing, determined to master the “prise de fer”. Her library began at the same age – collecting cheap between-the-wars editions of diaries and memoirs from the Georgian era. She spent the second half of her childhood in Switzerland but returned to Oxford University to take a degree in history. Sewing a loose buckle on a towering ugly sister’s shoe aged 16, as a dresser at the Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester, Rebecca discovered a fascination with theatre and celebrity that later led to her first non-fiction book, a biography of Georgian actress and anti-slavery campaigner, Fanny Kemble (The Reluctant Celebrity, Simon & Schuster, 2005). Raif Jarrett, the returning soldier and detective of her Regency mystery series, first appeared in The Duke’s Agent in 1997. Despite the many distractions of a busy career in communications and PR, his world remains her first love. In between producing a book on The First London Olympics, 1908 (Piatkus Little Brown, 2012), the opening novels of the Faith Morgan series (as Martha Ockley - Monarch Books), and serving as a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at York St John University, she managed to return to write the second book of the series, Death of a Radical. She is presently at work on the third Jarrett mystery.

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You can follow Rebecca on X.

A native of Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, Richard A. Sauers received his BA in History from Susquehanna University, and both his MA and PhD in History from The Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of more than two dozen books, including the highly-acclaimed two-volume Advance the Colors! Pennsylvania Civil War Battle Flags (1987–1991), A Succession of Honorable Victories: The Burnside Expedition in North Carolina (1996), Meade: Victor of Gettysburg (2004), America's Battlegrounds (2005), The Fishing Creek Confederacy: A Story of Civil War Draft Resistance (2013), The National Tribune Civil War Index (2017), and the forthcoming Gettysburg Postcards: An Illustrated Guide. He has been in the public history arena since 1984 and recently retired as the curator of the Western Museum of Mining and Industry in Colorado Springs.

Richard Kurti is passionate about fictionalising compelling true stories which have been buried in history, yet resonate with the modern world. He is an established writer working in film and television, with clients including Warner Bros, Universal, Working Title and Fox Searchlight, and mainstream TV shows produced by BBC, ITV and Sky. He has also written extensively for radio, with award-winning dramas for BBC Radio 4 and podcast serials for Amazon Audible. Get in touch X: @Richard_Kurti Instagram: richardkurtiwriter Website: www.richardkurti.com The Basilica Diaries Medieval Mysteries Every year, 10 million people visit St Peter’s Basilica in Rome; the Sistine Chapel alone is the most visited room in the world. The Basilica Diaries Medieval Mystery series weave thrilling fictional stories around the true historical events and characters of Renaissance Italy, and the turbulent construction of St Peter’s. These crime and mystery stories are told with a fast pulse and modern style.

The Honorary Lieutenant-General of the Canadian Armed Forces, Richard Rohmer, was born in Hamilton, Ontario. He began his military career in 1936, serving with the ROTC (Reserve Officers Training Corps) at Eagle Rock High School in Pasadena, California. General Rohmer served with the RCAF as a fighter-reconnaissance pilot during 1942–1945. He took part in the D-Day Operation, serving in France, Belgium and Holland and completing a 135-mission tour of operations in November 1944. He was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross. On May 8, 1944, he had a conversation and confrontation with General George S. Patton, who was regarded by the Germans as the top Allied fighting general. AT 5:05pm on July 17, 1944 while leading a section of four Mustang fighter aircraft on a low-level reconnaissance, General Rohmer caught Field Marshal Rommel in his staff car southeast of Caen and called in Spitfires that shot up Rommel’s vehicle, seriously injuring the Field Marshal and taking him out of the Battle of Normandy. General Rohmer is the only combatant of World War Two who had contact with the top generals on both sides in Europe — Patton and Rommel. He also served in the Royal Canadian Naval Reserve during 1946–1948. In 1950, during the Cold War, General Rohmer returned to the RCAF, flying Vampire fighter jets. He commanded 400 Squadron (City of Toronto) and 411 Squadron (County of York) during 1952–53. He retired in 1953 as a Wing Commander. In 1971 he again associated with the Canadian Armed Forces as Honorary Lieutenant-Colonel and later Honorary Colonel of 411 Air Reserve Squadron and flew as a line pilot. During 1975–78 he served on the Canadian Military Colleges Advisory Board to the Minister of National Defence and on the sub-committee responsible for Royal Military College Affairs. In April 1975, he was promoted to Brigadier-General and appointed Senior Air Reserve Advisor to the Chief of the Defence Staff. On 1 April, 1976 he was appointed Commander of the newly formed Air Reserve Group in Air Command. On January 31, 1978 he was promoted to the rank of Major-General and appointed the first Chief of Reserves of the Canadian Armed Forces. He was then made a Commander of the Order of Military Merit in December 1978. He left the Armed forces in February 1981, but returned in 2014/15 as the Honorary Advisor to the Chief of the Defence Staff. On 26 June 2015 he was appointed the Honorary Lieutenant-General of the Canadian Armed Forces. Author photograph credit: Ana Seara and Ann Rohmer, taken in 2024.

Robert Charles has spent a lifetime travelling and writing. As a young man he spent two years in the British Merchant Navy, and then did two overland trips to India and South East Asia, plus an overland trip across Africa. Those early travels gave him the backgrounds for a long list of adventure thrillers. Later he served twenty years as a retained fireman in the Suffolk Fire Brigade. Now he is married and has helped to raise three children. On retirement he and his wife Elizabeth embarked on a round the world trip together, adding China, Australia, New Zealand, the Pacific and North America to the long list of places visited. Through it all he has continued to write and has now produced more than 60 novels and 10 non-fiction books under three pen names.

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Air Commodore Roderick Chisholm, CBE, DSO, DFC & Bar (23 November 1911–7 December 1994) was a night fighter pilot, flying ace and a highly decorated British airman of the Second World War. Roderick was born in Nairn, Scotland. He was educated at Ampleforth College in Yorkshire from the age of six, after his father had died, and later at the Imperial College of Science and Technology, where he gained a BSc in Chemistry. In 1932 he joined the Anglo Persian Oil Company (BP) as a research chemist. He transferred to Iran in 1935 where he worked first as a chemist at the Abadan Refinery, and later as a technical services manager in Tehran before he returned to the UK at the outbreak of war. Whilst in Iran he played polo. After the war, following a short return to Iran, he became the personnel manager of the Kuwait Oil Company in London. In 1955 he was appointed general manager of Iranian Oil Services and later its chairman. He retired in 1970. Outside work he helped Hungarian refugees after the 1956 uprising, and looked after the finances of a youth club in Poplar, London. In retirement, first in London and then from 1978 in Alresford, Hampshire he was the honorary treasurer of the Georgian Group, a trustee of the Leach Trust, and a guide at Winchester Cathedral. He also pursued his penchant for making fine furniture and decoration out of the most unpromising materials. Between 1930 and 1935 he served with 604 Squadron of the Royal Auxiliary Air Force where he was commissioned and gained his wings. During his time in Persia, from 1935 to the outbreak of war, he flew during leave with the RAF in neighbouring Iraq. He rejoined 604 Squadron, now a night fighter unit based at Middle Wallop, Hampshire in June 1940 after re-training. The squadron was one of the first to use and develop airborne radar to find aircraft at night. Flying Beaufighters, he shot down seven enemy planes, for which he was awarded two DFCs. In March 1942 he was assigned to do staff work at 81 Group, which undertook night fighter training. Later, in July, he was made CO of the Fighter Interception Unit at Ford, Sussex. This unit was charged with improving the effectiveness of airborne interception radar. In November 1943 Roderick joined Bomber Command to become second in command, with the rank of Air Commodore, of the newly formed 100 Group that was to develop Radio Counter Measures and night fighter support for bombers. During his time with 100 Group he managed to fly on operational missions. He shot down two more enemy aircraft and was awarded the DSO. At the end of the war he was awarded the CBE. Cover of Darkness is an account of his involvement in wartime night fighter operations and the development of airborne radar. It was first published in 1953. In 1945 Roderick married Sanchia Whitworth, a WAAF officer. They had a son, Julian, and two daughters, Jane and Rose.

Roger Longrigg (1 May 1929–26 February 2000) was born into a military family in Edinburgh, Scotland. He spent some of his childhood in the Middle East, where his father was stationed, but returned to England to study at Bryanston School. He then read History at Magdalen College, Oxford. After completing his degree, he joined an advertising agency in 1955, before writing two novels, A High-Pitched Buzz (1956) and Switchboard (1957), based on his experiences there. He subsequently went on to write fifty-five novels under eight different pseudonyms, revelling in the challenge and diversity each individual identity afforded him. Extraordinarily, he achieved success within every genre he turned his pen to. He was married to writer Jane Chichester and had three daughters. His Dan Mallett Investigations are cosy murder mysteries set in rural England.

Ronald Healiss (23rd April 1914–25 December 1980) was a Royal Marine who served as a member of a 4.7 gun crew on the HMS Glorious. His experience on the Glorious is chronicled in his memoir, Arctic Rescue. Ronald was born in West Derby suburb of Liverpool. As a youngster he was a strong swimmer and spent many hours teaching younger children how to swim – little did he know just how useful this skill would be later in life. After school he became an apprentice chef with British Railways Hotels, starting at the Adelphi, Liverpool before spending time in Birmingham and Glen Eagles in Scotland, specialising in butchery. Before the outbreak of the Second World War he decided that he would join the military. He first applied to the Scots Guards, but was rejected because he was two inches too short of the six foot requirement height, before being accepted into the Royal Marines in 1933. Plymouth was his home port and it was while based at Eastney Barracks in Southsea that he met his future wife. HMS Glorious was part of the Mediterranean fleet and he spent the later 1930s travelling to places such as Malta, Gibraltar, Alexandria, the Red Sea and Ceylon. Shortly after the outbreak of the war HMS Glorious was brought back to British waters and based in Scapa Flow to support the retreat from Norway, which is why it was in Arctic waters when set upon by the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau. After being demobilised in 1946, Ronald looked for jobs as a cook, but struggling to find anything in this line of work, he found employment in one of the many manufacturing companies in area as a commissionaire, which gave him the opportunity to join the Corps of Commissionaires due to long military service. He rose to become Chief Commissionaire at Skefko Ball Bearing Co. Ltd and was a trusted personal assistant to the Directors and Senior Management of the SKF Group. Although Ronald recorded his memories in Arctic Rescue, he rarely talked about his experiences and could never be found on Remembrance Sunday while other members of the family watched the commemoration at the Cenotaph on television. One of the saddest times was the cessation of his meagre disability pension from the War Office soon after the publication of his book, which left him wondering whether he had raised too many questions over the tragedy of HMS Glorious and the huge numbers of lives that were lost. Ronald retired in 1979 but sadly passed away on Christmas Day the following year, at the age of sixty-six. He had been warned by Naval Surgeons in Scotland after his rescue in the Arctic that if he survived the effects of the extreme frostbite, then if he reached the age of 50 that he would have the body of an 80 year old!

A retired head teacher, used to writing policy documents, essays and stories for young children, Ros Rendle has now taken up the much greater challenge of writing fiction for adults. She writes both historical sagas and contemporary romance; perfect for reading by a swimming pool in summer or curling up with on a cosy sofa. Her books are thoroughly researched and often have a French connection, since she lived in France for ten years. Now Ros is back in the UK. She has two daughters and four granddaughters, with whom she shares many activities. When not writing, Ros spends time ballroom or Latin dancing as well as dog walking, not always at the same time, although she and her husband were caught once dancing down a country lane. Ros is a member of the Romantic Novelists' Association and is a founder committee member for the Deepings Literary Festival.

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You can get in touch with Ros on her website or follow her on X and Facebook.

Rozsa Gaston is a historical fiction author who writes books on women who reach for what they want out of life. She is the author of Maid of Honour (Grand Prize Winner of the 2024 Chaucer Book Award for Early Historical Fiction),  Margaret of Austria (First Place Winner of the 2023 Chaucer Book Award for Early Historical Fiction), the four-book Anne of Brittany Series: Anne and Charles; Anne and Louis (General Fiction Winner of the 2018 Publishers Weekly BookLife Prize); Anne and Louis: Rulers and Lovers; and Anne and Louis: Forever Bound (First Place Winner of the 2022 Chaucer Book Award for Early Historical Fiction). Her other works include Sense of Touch and Marguerite and Gaston. Rozsa studied European History at Yale and received her master’s degree in International Affairs from Columbia. She worked at Institutional Investor magazine, then as a columnist for The Westchester Guardian. She is currently working on The Anne Boleyn Chronicles - a new series set during the sixteenth century and covering the earlier life of infamous Tudor queen Anne Boleyn. She lives in Bronxville, New York with her family. Her motto? History matters.

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You can get in touch with Rozsa on her website or follow her on Facebook and Instagram.

Sarah Baring (20 January 1920–4 February 2013) was an English socialite and memoirist, who worked for three years as a linguist at Bletchley Park, the principal centre of Allied code-breaking during the Second World War. Born Sarah Kathleen Elinor Norton, the only daughter of the 6th Lord Grantley and his wife Jean (née Kinloch), Sarah was brought up mainly in Scotland, where she was educated by a succession of disagreeable European governesses. When she was 17 her parents dispatched her to Munich to broaden her horizons and learn German. After war was declared, Sarah worked briefly for Vogue magazine, writing captions for photographs of models for five shillings a week. She also wrote articles for the Baltimore Sun in America before signing up as a telephonist at an Air Raid Precautions Centre. She then helped to build Hurricanes at the Hawker Siddeley factory near Slough: “I hadn’t expected the work there to be quite as hard as it was, but we were fired up with the desire to make aeroplanes.” Sarah had never heard of Bletchley Park, and when she arrived she was assigned to Hut 4. “Nobody explained anything,” she recalled. “You were merely told that pieces of paper in German would come through and you had to take out any salient information, put it all on to a filing card with the coordinates, and index it. The information we were dealing with was obviously decrypted. Even then we didn’t know the whole picture. We just did what we were told.” Sarah worked on the Naval Section index, helping to provide details of the U-boats to Hut 8, run at that time by Alan Turing, of whom she once said: “[He] was immensely shy, especially of girls... I once offered him a cup of tea, [and] he shrank back as if I’d got measles or something. He was wonderful. We were all very proud of him.” Sarah spent three years at Bletchley, and in 1944 was sent to the Operational Intelligence Centre at the Admiralty in London as a liaison officer between the Admiralty and Bletchley. Sarah Baring is the author of The Road to Station X, about her wartime experiences and her life as a debutante. She is survived by her son, the 4th Viscount Astor, and by an adopted son, Edward, from her second marriage.

Seán Gibbons, originally from Galway City, now lives with his partner in Wexford in the sunny south east of Ireland. He is a graduate of the National University of Ireland, Galway and Brunel University, London. After a career spent mostly in youth work and social care, Seán is at last able to indulge his lifelong passion for writing. In the early 2000’s he spent four years driving a taxi in Galway and it was from this experience that his unconventional, taxi-driving crime-solver, Ben Miller, gained life. Along with writing crime fiction and historical thrillers, Seán is also an award-winning playwright and filmmaker. When not writing, Seán is a patient, often frustrated, and always passionate supporter of Galway United FC, his hometown League of Ireland club. As his London-born mother lived on Britannia Road, SW London, there are no prizes for guessing the identity of his other team!

Simon Michael is the author of the best-selling Charles Holborne Legal Thrillers – gritty, hard-boiled mysteries set in 1960s London and featuring barrister Charles Holborne. Simon writes from personal experience: a barrister for thirty-seven years, he worked in the Old Bailey and other criminal courts defending and prosecuting a wide selection of murderers, armed robbers, con artists and other assorted villainy. The 1960s was the Wild West of British justice, a time when the Krays, Richardsons and other violent gangs fought for control of London’s organised crime, and the corrupt Metropolitan Police beat up suspects, twisted evidence and took a share of the criminal proceeds. Simon weaves into his thrillers real events of the time and genuine court documents from cases on which he worked. Simon was published in the UK and in America in the 1980s and returned to writing when he retired from the law in 2016. Simon’s theme is alienation; Holborne, who dabbled in crime and in serious violence before becoming a barrister, is an outsider both in the East End where he grew up and in the Temples of the Law where he faces daily class and religious prejudice. He has been compared to Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe and Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade, honourable men surrounded by corruption and violence, trying to steer an honest course. Simon supplements his writing with his entertaining one-man show, My Life in Crime, which he performs up to fifty times a year to Rotary, WI, library and other groups.

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Stephen Taylor was born in Yorkshire and brought up in Manchester (he is still an avid Manchester City fan). A widower with a grown-up daughter, the retired tax inspector now lives near Loughborough with his new partner. Stephen has always admired the skill of the storyteller, and his character-driven historical fiction aspires to that tradition.

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You can check out Stephen's website here.

A chance meeting as a teenager with a woman whose fiancé flew in the First World War triggered Suzanne’s fascination with the adventures and aviation of this period. But after a degree in Chemical Sciences at Leeds University and a career as a development chemist, there seemed little opportunity to pursue such interests. That was until a move to the Scottish Highlands provided the perfect career change to do so. Working as a librarian and surrounded by books, Suzanne was able to indulge her passion for literature, creative writing, historical fiction and everything aviation. Several research trips to Belgium and Northern France resulted in Suzanne’s first book, Secrets in the Sky, which was one of nine books selected for Hachette UK’s Future Bookshelf Cohort for 2021. The book is the first in a fictional series of female-led wartime adventure stories. A keen runner, Suzanne divides her time between family, her feline friends, writing, reading, overseeing a local writing group, library work and, of course, watching the sky.

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You can contact Suzanne via Facebook or X.

Sydney Hart served as a submariner in the North Sea, the Atlantic, and the Mediterranean during the Second World War. Unable to settle in Civvy Street in post-war England, he decided to emigrate to Australia aboard the Empire Brent. It was on board this ship that he met his future wife, Betty. Following the birth of their first child, the family decided to return to the UK. With the sea always in his blood, Sydney joined the crew of the George, bound for the Middle East, and then later accepting a position in a car factory. It was after this that he began to write about his experiences and three books followed. His last request was that he be buried at sea from Portsmouth, as a true submariner.

Tanya Jean Russell became addicted to reading as soon as she could hold a book and read her way around the world, first as a military child, and then as an air hostess. Now living in Northamptonshire, England she is married to an amazing Elvis and Neil Diamond tribute artist, thanks to whom she has a house full of jumpsuits and trophies. This, of course, is a source of much embarrassment to their two teenage children! Tanya squeezes writing around her family and her day job in HR, and is convinced that chocolate and diet coke should be considered a well-balanced diet! Get in touch You can can get in touch with Tanya on her website, or follow her on  Facebook and X.

Terence Robertson (25 July 1921–31 January 1970) was an officer in the Royal Navy during the Second World War. He subsequently worked as the news editor of the Sunday newspaper Reynolds News from 1949 until 1959, after which he moved to Canada to join the editorial staff of The Hamilton Spectator.

Teresa F. Morgan moved from Surrey to Weston-super-Mare in 1998 – and tries very hard to hold onto her Surrey accent! She lives with her two sons and a budgie called Rio. When she’s not working (the day job) or amusing her sons, she is writing. Teresa is a member of the Romantic Novelists’ Association and The Society of Authors. She is also involved locally in the Weston Literary Festival and Weston Writers’ Nights. She was appointed (unofficially) as social secretary for her RNA Weston to Wells chapter because she’s quite organised and a little bit bossy. Teresa is at her happiest baking cakes, putting proper home-cooked dinners on the table (whether the kids eat them or not), reading a good romance, or sitting at her PC emptying her thoughts onto the screen. She also has an obsession for superheroes and likes a cocktail (or two). Teresa loves writing contemporary romance – uplifting stories with a touch of escapism, and creating heroes that readers will fall in love with.

Get in touch

You can can get in touch with Teresa on her website, or follow her on Facebook and X. You can find all of Teresa's titles on Goodreads too.

Tim Chant grew up (after a fashion) and went to school in deepest darkest rural Lincolnshire, followed by university in Scotland. After pitching up in Edinburgh with a History degree and no plan, he ended up in the Civil Service and currently works on environmental policy. When not shackled to his work desk, he writes, roleplays, wargames and very occasionally indulges in historical fencing. Reading and story-telling have always been a big part of his life. Having grown up on a diet of classic naval and other historical adventures and with a passion for history, writing historical fiction was perhaps inevitable. He lives in Scotland with his partner and their two rabbits. The Marcus Baxter Naval Thrillers are action-packed, authentic historical adventures following former Royal Navy officer Marcus Baxter during the early 1900s. You can visit Tim's website here.

Squadron Leader Tom Bennett DFM (27 January 1919–9 January  2013) flew as a navigator in one of the specialist crews on No. 617 (Dambusters) Squadron. He was born in Poplar, London, the second son of a London dockworker and an Irish immigrant, but won a scholarship to Raine's Foundation School. Tom passed with honours, but due to family circumstances he had to find work at the age of 16. He obtained a clerical post in Ladywell, Lewisham. He joined the RAF in early 1940 and qualified as a navigator. He flew in numerous types of small aircraft as well as the far larger bombers. Tom married his childhood sweetheart, Lillian, in October 1940 and they went on to have five children. He was commissioned and remained in the RAF after the war, serving in various locations including Malta, Lincolnshire and the Isle of Man. On discharge, Tom and Lillian settled in Westcliff-on-Sea in Essex and he worked for the British India Steam Navigation Company until his retirement. During his latter years he was heavily involved in the 617 Squadron Association and committed to their charitable causes. Tom attended the opening of the Bomber Command Memorial in Hyde Park on 28 June 2012, and passed away peacefully the following January, two weeks before his 94th birthday.

Tony Rea describes himself as a writer and people's historian. Born in 1958, he was brought up in a working-class household in Salford and, having failed the 11-plus examination, educated at a secondary modern school for boys. He later graduated in Modern History, and has a master’s degree and a PhD. Between 1980 and 2002 Tony worked as a schoolteacher before becoming a university lecturer. Now semi-retired, Tony lives in Ivybridge in Devon. Apart from researching and writing, Tony enjoys Dartmoor, the sea, sailing, and growing vegetables! He also likes spending time with his ever-expanding family. Tony made his first venture into writing while chief examiner of a large GCSE history examination syllabus. He has been writing professionally ever since, with his first publication in 1997. His books reflect his interest in military history, which clearly inspire his writing. The Gus Beaumont Aviation Thrillers series are thrilling, action-packed military adventure novels set during the Second World War. Tony thinks good history should be as entertaining as fiction and historical fiction should be as accurate as fact – with a note to the reader saying when it isn’t.

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You can follow Tony on Facebook, X and TikTok. 

Valerie Holmes became a published author when she won Writing Magazine’s annual Ghost Story Competition in 2002 with Three Squashed Pumpkins. Since then she has had over forty novellas published. The majority of her historical romances/mysteries are set in the early nineteenth century in a time of dramatic social change and of war with France. Smuggling, espionage and press-gangs all add to the drama that the protagonist faces. Valerie's work also includes contemporary titles. Two of her novellas were shortlisted for the category Romance Award by the Romantic Novelists’ Association. She literally ‘Loves the Adventure!’ Growing up in a coastal town on the edge of North Yorkshire, Valerie Holmes' novella world often reflects her love of the dramatic beauty of North Yorkshire; an area where she enjoys both hiking and discovering its fascinating history. She is an experienced creative writing tutor of distance learning courses who enjoys being able to encourage unpublished writers to move towards their dreams. She also completes manuscript appraisals for the Romantic Novelists’ Association New Writers' Scheme. As a reader for the Historical Novel Society she reviews both adult and children’s books. She is a member of the Society of Authors, The Crime Writers’ Association, Historical Novel Society and the Romantic Novelists’ Association.

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You can check out Valerie's website here and follow her on Facebook and X.

W. G. Hoskins (22 May 1908 – 11 January 1992) was born in Exeter, Devon. The Hoskins family had lived in Devon for some 500 years and his fierce pride in descent from Devon yeomen was one of the strongest forces shaping his personality. He attended school in Exeter and continued his education at the University College of the South West where he completed his degree at the age of 19. He went on to complete an MSc on ‘The Rise and Decline of the serge industry in SW England’ by the age of 21. As well as writing many books, the most well known being The Making of the English Landscape, he also made a series for BBC television entitled Landscapes of England. As founder of the Department of English Local History (now the Centre for English Local History) at the University of Leicester, his achievements are commemorated by the Friends of the Centre for English Local History each year in the annual W. G. Hoskins lecture, and another at St Anne's College, Oxford. In 2004 the Devon History Society erected a blue plaque on his birthplace in Exeter with the inscription: "W. G. Hoskins CBE FBA Dlitt 1908–1992 Historian of Devon, Exeter and the English Landscape Born Here 'Hic Amor, Haec Patria Est'."