Anselm Audley's Blog

Just before Christmas I signed a contract with Amazon’s Thomas & Mercer imprint for a new book, due out in September 2017. It’s not business as usual – this is more in the nature of ghostwriting. Rather literally, in a sense.

My mother, Elizabeth Edmondson, was a writer from a family of writers. In the course of her career she wrote over thirty novels in a variety of genres, under an assortment of names, with translations into over a dozen languages.
Her last two books were set in the fiction...

My third Single, Plato and the Tyrant, is now available from the Kindle Store. Returning to my original preoccupation with the ancient world, it tells the story of the quixotic, misconceived and ultimately tragic attempt to mould a wilful young tyrant into the ideal of a philosopher king.

The greatest philosopher who ever lived.
A dissolute tyrant in need of an education.
What could possibly go wrong?

Plato was the most brilliant thinker of his age. Head of the Academy in Athens, friend of t...

My second Kindle Single, Death Keeps His Court, is now available in the Amazon Kindle Single Store. 1800-odd years on from the Arginusae Trials, it moves from democracy to monarchy and from classical Athens to mediaeval England, telling the story of a King who became a tyrant and the man who didn’t claim his throne.

A tyrant on the throne…

Richard II was young, handsome, and elegant. Last living child of the brilliant Black Prince, he came to the throne bearing the hopes of his people on his...

A reader asked me what the best software is for writing a novel. There’s a short answer, and then there’s an interesting answer.

The short answer: anything which can output in .doc format. That’s it. A word processor which can produce Microsoft-readable files, the industry standard. Word, OpenOffice, LibreOffice are all fine as long as you save as .doc when sending to anyone else. Several authors I know swear by a program called Scribner, which is designed for long complicated documents, and...

Nobody wrote historical fiction quite like Colleen McCullough. Her Masters of Rome books were giant, comprehensive, exhaustively researched – and utterly compelling. In seven books, she told the entire story of the fall of the Roman Republic, from the outbreak of the Jugurthine War in 110 B.C. to the death of Caesarion in 30 B.C.

Rarely in human history, she said in one of her forewords, had so many giant figures lived so closely clustered in time and space. She brought them to life in all the...

I have a new release! The Day Democracy Died, my first non-fiction title, is being published today as an Amazon Kindle Single – here on the US store and here in the UK. Retelling a single tragic episode from the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta, full of sea battles, politics, and the colours of the Mediterranean, it’s history as drama: tense, atmospheric, and free of scholarly equivocation. It’s also as accurate as the often contradictory source material allows. Beyond that, I shal...

I have a new story out!

A couple months back, my agent came to hear about Amazon’s Kindle Worlds program, and so I had the opportunity to write for the beta stage. Being a fantasy author with an interest in history (and with a schoolfriend who was interested in anything and everything Mongol) I thought the Foreworld universe could be fun to write in – and so it proved. It’s the first time I’ve written fiction based on someone else’s universe; it was fun, and it taught me a lot. Even meeting th...

Yesterday was the beginning of a novel. A papal conclave delivers what to the world (if not the cardinals) is a shock result: a Vatican outsider from an unexpected country, whose personal humility is outstanding, and who takes a name unlike any chosen by a Pope before.

In a novel, of course (and there have been a fair number written on this very theme, some using this very name), the story from here would write itself. The Pope, his clock already ticking, clashes with Vatican insiders. His mes...

This is a very local post, and about architecture, not writing. But it’s also about language, so even those of you reading from over the seas might find it interesting.

Anyone who lives in Oxford is probably aware by now of the fight going on over the University’s developments at the edge of Port Meadow, not least because Philip Pullman has weighed in on the side of the angels. You may not be aware of another proposal, no less ill-fitting and monstrous, approaching the end of its public consul...

Anne Fine, from her own website.

The childrens’ author Anne Fine was being interviewed (amid much delightful Bach and Beethoven) on the radio this morning, and amongst other things the question came up as to why she’d studied History and Politics at university, rather than English. She attributed the initial decision to adolescent stupidity (her words, not mine), but then went on to say that she was very glad she hadn’t chosen English.

I couldn’t agree more, and it’s advice I’ve given to any yo...