Karen Maitland

Karen Maitland has an honours degree in Human Communication and doctorate in Psycholinguistics. Her first novel, The White Room, was short listed for The Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award. She also has written and co-written seventeen commissioned non-fiction books. She is a member of the Women Writers Network and the Historical Novel Society.

She has travelled extensively from the Arctic Circle to Albania, and has worked in Nigeria, Northern Ireland and Israel. Her work in Nigeria during a bloody civil war and in Northern Ireland during ‘the troubles’ has deepened a life-long interest in cross-cultural issues and she has worked as a writer and editor on a number of cross-cultural books including Poems of Cultural Diversity and Cinders in the Wind.

In 2002 she was commissioned by the National Rural Touring Forum to travel for three months in the middle of winter with a multicultural show playing in twenty-one isolated and rural locations from Cumbria to Devon, to write a book about the performers, audiences, people and places. It was this tour that first sparked the idea for her medieval thriller, Company of Liars, as she began to appreciate what life must have been like for those people who had to earn their living on the road.

Her love of all things medieval grew from frequent ‘escape’ visits across the North Sea to Belgium, following in the footsteps of her hero Stephen Fry, and she now lives in the splendid medieval city of Lincoln.

 

 


/www.karenmaitland.com

 

Titles: Company of Liars, The Owl Killers (Michael Joseph/Bantam Dell USA) next: The Mandrake's Tale

     
 

The Owl Killers

England, 1321. Deep in the heart of countryside lies an isolated village governed by a sinister regime of Owl Masters - theirs is a pagan world of terror and blackmail, where neighbour denounces neighbour and sin is punishable by murder. This dark status quo is disturbed by the arrival of a house of religious women, who establish a community outside the village. Why do their crops succeed when village crops fail; their cattle survive despite the plague? But petty jealousy turns deadly when the women give refuge to a young martyr. For she dies a gruesome death after spitting the sacramental host into flames that can't burn it - what magic is this? Or is the martyr now a saint and the host a holy relic? Accusations of witchcraft and heresy run rife while the Owl Masters rain down hellfire and torment on the women, who must look to their faith to save them from the lengthening shadow of Evil ... a shadow with predatory, terrifying talons.

 

 

 


 

     

Without Hilary I would never have been taken on by an agent or had my novels published. I am deeply indebted to her for her time, her advice and her unfailing encouragement.

                                                                                                                        Karen Maitland

 

     
    < Back to Authors >