AUTHOR GUESTS of HONOR

MARGARET GEORGE was born in Nashville, Tennessee, but had a 19th century upbringing, growing up overseas at embassies in Taiwan, Israel, and Germany, where her father, a Foreign Service officer, was assigned. This not only gave her a sense of history but made books her main source of entertainment. Because she soon depleted the English books in her house, she started writing her own for enjoyment. Meticulously written on yellow legal pads and illustrated by the author, she sent the first one off in hopes of publication when she was 12.

It was not until about thirty years later that her novel The Autobiography of Henry VIII was published. In between, Margaret got a B.S. from Tufts University (in English literature and biology) and an M.S. from Stanford University (in ecology), worked as a science writer for the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, and in the information office at Washington University in St. Louis. She also lived in Uppsala, Sweden, where the first draft of Henry VIII was written, as well as Erlangen, Germany, before settling in Madison, Wisconsin.

Specializing in psychological fictional biographies of epic personalities she feels have been misunderstood by history, Margaret followed The Autobiography of Henry VIII (1986) with Mary Queen of Scotland and the Isles (1992), The Memoirs of Cleopatra (1997), Mary Called Magdalene (2002), and Helen of Troy (2006). All of these have been bestsellers, and have been translated into eighteen languages. The Memoirs of Cleopatra was made into an ABC-TV miniseries in 1999. In addition, she wrote a children’s book, Lucille Lost, in 2006, that featured her own pet tortoise. Returning to England, her next book, Elizabeth: The Last Battle, will be published in 2010 by Viking/Penguin.

Hobbies and interests include coins of Cleopatra’s era, herpetology (snakes and turtles), and track and field. She is a member of the Archaeological Institute of America, the Society of Ancient Medicine, the Friends of Troy, the New York Turtle and Tortoise Society, and US Track and Field, where she competes nationally in the 100 and 200 meters and the long jump. She is married and has one adult daughter. (Photo credit: Michael Dunlea)

SHARON KAY PENMAN is the author of seven critically acclaimed historical novels: The Sunne in Splendour, Here be Dragons, Falls the Shadow, The Reckoning, When Christ and his Saints Slept, Time and Chance, and Devil’s Brood. She has also written four medieval mysteries. Her first was The Queen’s Man, the queen in question being Eleanor of Aquitaine, a finalist for an Edgar Award for Best First Mystery from the Mystery Writers of America. Her other mysteries are Cruel as the Grave, Dragon’s Lair, and Prince of Darkness. She lives in New Jersey.

Reviews for Sharon Kay Penman

"An historical novelist of the first rank."
--Publishers Weekly

‘Bloody and violent deaths, tearful betrayals by close relatives, dizzying shifts of power – Sharon Penman is particularly good at battles – the whole is very convincing."
--Times

"She manages to illuminate the alien shadowland of the Middle Ages and populate it with vital characters whose politics and passions are as vivid as our own."
--San Francisco Chronicle

"A new Penman novel is always cause for celebration."
--Historical Novel Society