Writers' stories

Damien Lewis on the collaboration behind his SAS histories  Read more

History has always fascinated me, and I have been fortunate enough to study it full time and make a living writing non-fiction histories of the ancient world, as well as historical novels. I have written six novels set during the Peninsular War, and since then I have set stories in the Roman Empire at the end of the first century and start of the second century AD.

Natasha Brown was young - "not even in secondary school" - when she first read Wuthering Heights. She'd crept down to her grandparents' basement, looking for a book to put her to sleep. "I started reading it and I stayed up all night," she laughs. Today, the very same copy of Wuthering Heights peeks out from a shelf behind her in her Mile End home.  Read more

My first crime novel, Seven Miles From Sydney, was published in 1987, when I was 29. I wrote it for the saddest of reasons. My good friend, the Australian screenwriter Miranda Downes, had been murdered two years earlier while jogging on a Queensland beach.

From writing in her lunch break at Hampstead Waterstones, to securing an international publishing deal, Lorraine Brown was finally able to see her debut novel on the shelves when lockdown eased.

She wrote Uncoupling while working as a secretary at Devonshire House School, but didn't get the chance to see it in bookshops when it was published in February.