The Dark Ages

Sara Sheridan

Sara Sheridan is an Edinburgh-based writer and activist. She writes historical fiction and creative nonfiction. Her 1950s cosy crime noir murder mystery series featuring Mirabelle Bevan has its 9th out this year – Celtic Cross – set just outside Edinburgh in 1959. She has also written 5 novels in the period 1820 – 1845 and this year the The Fair Botanists set in Edinburgh in 1822, has charmed critics and readers alike – the first edition sold out in under a fortnight. Sara’s remapping of Scotland according to female history, Where are the Women? was listed as of the David Hume Institute’s most important non-fiction books in 2019 and Sara continues to campaign for more diverse memorialisation of historical achievements including her involvement in the Accused Witches of Scotland campaign.

Leonora Nattrass

Leonora Nattrass studied eighteenth-century literature and politics, and spent ten years as an English Literature lecturer, including eight at Nottingham Trent University. During this time she published several works on William Cobbett, and was a reviewer for The Year’s Work in English Studies journal. She then moved to Cornwall, where she lives in a seventeenth-century house with seventeenth-century draughts, and spins the fleeces of her traditional Ryeland sheep into yarn. Black Drop is her first novel. 1.4k followers on Twitter

SW Perry

S W Perry began his first career – in journalism – when he joined Radio 210 in 1977 as a trainee news reporter. He went on to work for LBC, presenting news programmes and reading the news on IRN, the ITN of the commercial radio network. He was a commentator for the IRN team that covered the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer. He spent six years as head of news for one of the UK’s commercial radio stations.

In the early eighties he began to indulge an interest in flying, gaining his pilot’s licence. He flew a vintage Tiger Moth biplane, as well as the traffic spotting aircraft for Essex Radio. Gaining his commercial rating, he left broadcasting behind and took up aviation full time. He then spent the next thirty years flying for a living, ending up as a senior captain with a major UK leisure airline. Steve lives in rural Worcestershire with his wife Jane.

When he’s not writing the Jackdaw series – four books set in Elizabethan London and published by Corvus Books – he’s to be found indulging his love for the works of William Shakespeare in the audience at the RSC theatre in nearby Stratford-Upon-Avon.

Sue Lawrence

Sue Lawrence is the author of absorbing, popular historical thrillers and mysteries that cast fascinating light on the perils and injustice that characterised women’s lives in Scotland through centuries past – whether born into penniless or powerful families – including The Unreliable Death of Lady Grange, Down to the Sea and most recently The Green Lady. She is also one of the UK’s leading cookery writers and broadcasters. Having trained as a journalist, she won BBC’s MasterChef in 1991 and became a food writer. A regular contributor to the Sunday Times, Scotland on Sunday and many leading magazines, she also appears frequently on BBC Radio. Born in Dundee, she was raised in Edinburgh, where she now lives. She has won a number of writing awards and is the author of more than 20 books.