A gorgeously written, utterly absorbing epic and, despite being set in the sixteenth century, has some very pertinent messages for our time about the evils of religious persecution and the transcendent power of love and family. In case it’s not clear enough yet, I absolutely LOVED it - Lucy Foley, author of The Hunting Party

To fill out whatever time is left in her schedule, she also writes plays, and sits as the president of the arts festival and the patron of the flower festival in her native Chichester, where she lives with her husband, Greg. A champion of women's creativity, Kate is the Founder Director of the Women's Prizes - the largest annual celebration of women's writing in the world - and is the Founder of the global campaign #WomanInHistory launched in January 2021 to honour, celebrate and promote women’s achievements throughout history. She was awarded an OBE in 2013 for services to literature and women, was named Woman of the Year for her service to the arts in the Everywoman Awards and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. A regular guest on book & arts shows on radio and television, shealso writes and presents documentaries. To celebrate her 60th birthday, she launched her own YouTube book channel – Kate-Mosse-on-Books – with a monthly show ‘Mosse on a Monday’. Anthology of World War I Literature for Children (essay – edited by Michael Morpurgo, Jonathan Cape, 2014) I wasn’t sure I was going to do something like that,” she says of the book, “but I was asked to and then I realised that it was about the invisibility of carers, and therefore there was a sense of a responsibility. If you have any sort of platform and you are a carer you should be saying, I’m one too, because we are everywhere hidden in plain sight.” People don’t want to read a book about the refugee crisis, but they can fall in love with characters and feel their hearts broken when they have to flee their homes and have nowhere to live

Meet Kate Mosse

Writer Kate Mosse, founder of the Women's Prize for Fiction, and actor Stanley Tucci attend the 2023 winner's ceremony at Bedford Square Gardens, London on June 14th. Photograph: Ian West/PA Wire. Mosse includes all the ingredients you would expect from a historical epic – murder, treachery, lost children, stolen relics, buried secrets. - Stephanie Merritt, Observer A vibrant sequel to 2018’s Burning Chambers . . . The fascinating historical detail fuels the drama and keeps the plot zipping along - Publishers Weekly Every inch a classic Mosse novel, The City of Tears is diligently researched, beautifully written and, crucially right now, both substantial and immersive – if you want to leave twenty-first-century pandemic Britain behind, this should be your preferred mode of transport - Radio Times

But the bravest among them are not who they seem. The stakes could not be higher. If arrested, they will be hanged for their crimes. Can they survive the journey and escape their fate? Fifty Shades of Feminism (essay – edited by Lisa Appignanesi, Rachel Holmes & Susie Orbach, Virago, 2013) Mosse has, for many years, been a full-throated advocate for the power of books and reading to provide fulfilment, entertainment and education. Perhaps her greatest achievement beyond her own fiction is her creation, in 1996, of what is now the Women’s Prize for Fiction; its winners have included the very first, the late Helen Dunmore, Carol Shields, Zadie Smith, Eimear McBride and the recently victorious – and two-time winner – Barbara Kingsolver. Now, with Mosse as founder director, it has just launched its inaugural nonfiction prize, as a response to research showing that women who write nonfiction are less likely to be reviewed, to be shortlisted or win prizes, than their male counterparts. The work of ensuring that women writers’ work is judged on a level playing field continues. She is particularly interested in those moments when societies and countries have stood at crossroads. “All of my books are set at a turning point in history,” she explains, on cusps at which “if things had gone the other way, the whole of what happened would have been different. So in City of Tears, obviously, it’s the St Bartholomew’s Day massacre. It looked like there would be peace. And because of that, there wasn’t, and it went on for another generation. In The Burning Chambers, the first one, it’s if the Duke of Guise had not opened fire on people praying in Vassy on the first of March 1562, the wars of religion would not have happened like that.”

Languedoc Trilogy in Order

She is at pains, as we talk over Zoom, not to romanticise piracy, particularly in its “awful and violent and dangerous” modern-day manifestation, in which, as she notes, “the people who least can afford to suffer are suffering the most from it”. But it is undeniable that the past exercises a fascination, not least because “there is a justice within pirate society. It is very codified, but it’s also democratic. And it’s not what is going on on land, where people know their place, and you can’t rise out of your station; it’s incredibly unfair, and there’s a great deal of poverty. There, on the pirate ship, you follow the rules, you get the treasure, and everybody gets a share of the treasure.” Similarly, with the caveat that she is not a historian, she believes that had Henry IV of France not been assassinated in 1610, there is a case to be made that the French Revolution might not have followed or, at least, not in the way it did. “Because what happened at that moment was that his toleration, his attempt to build a modern society, which is what he was doing, his understanding that Huguenots – you wouldn’t use this phrase, but it’s essentially what they were – were the working middle class. And the wealth was there – that wasn’t to do with aristocracy, or what would have been seen as the peasantry at the other end. He was building a modern state that could have stood against anyone. Wonderful, rip roaringly adventurous and full of indelible characters. Mosse is a conjurer - Irenosen Okojie, author of Nudibranch

Another of Mosse’s immersive dramas, which takes you to the heart of the past - Grazia Book of the Week Mosse said: “I’m delighted that Mantle will be publishing my gender-swapping story of love and adventure at sea. The Ghost Ship has been a delight to work on from start to finish.” But her years of caring for family members have also paid another, perhaps unexpected, dividend. “I’m aware that some of the scenes I write in my fiction have been absolutely given more depth because of the emotions that I have experienced in real life. None of my characters are me, none of the characters are doing things that I want to do or wish to do. But the emotions that go into a novel, they come from somewhere, don’t they?”The Founder of the Women’s Prize for Fiction and recently launched Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction, Mosse is an award-winning novelist, playwright, essayist and non-fiction writer. Her most recent feminist non-fiction book, Warrior Queens and Quiet Revolutionaries: How Women (Also) Built the World (Mantle, October 2022), is now the basis for a one-woman theatre show.