Joanna Hickson Books in Order

If you want the Tudor story from the beginning: The Agincourt Bride → The Tudor Bride
If you want life inside Henry VII's court: The Lady of the Ravens → The Queen’s Lady
If you like Wars of the Roses power struggles: Red Rose, White Rose → First of the Tudors → The Tudor Crown
If you want a new family saga: The House of Seymour

Joanna Hickson was born in England and spent part of her early childhood in Australia. When she returned to Britain as a teenager and visited her first castle, medieval history stopped feeling like a school subject and became something far more alive. Place, weather, stone and story all seem to have mattered to her from that point on.

The spark had come even earlier. At school she was gripped by Shakespeare's history plays, and Catherine de Valois, the French princess in Henry V, lodged in her imagination so firmly that she kept coming back to her for years. What first looked romantic soon revealed a harder story about power, politics and survival.

She studied English and Politics, then built a long career at the BBC. For twenty-five years she presented and produced news and arts programmes for radio and television, a job that sounds very different from writing fifteenth-century fiction but shares some useful habits: clear structure, strong scenes, attention to people, and a feel for how public events alter private lives.

History kept tugging at her sleeve.

During those broadcasting years she also published a children's historical novel, Rebellion at Orford Castle. But the bigger turn came when decades of reading and research around Catherine de Valois finally became fiction. Hickson was interested not just in the official record, but in the woman hidden beneath it, someone usually reduced to being one king's wife and another king's mother.

That work led to The Agincourt Bride and The Tudor Bride, novels that follow Catherine from the troubled French court to the English throne, largely through the eyes of her loyal nurse and companion Mette. They set the pattern for much of Hickson's later work. She likes the meeting point between royal history and ordinary feeling, where marriages are political, households are strategic, and one private decision can ripple across a dynasty.

That became her lane.

From there she kept exploring the late medieval and early Tudor world in books like Red Rose, White Rose, First of the Tudors and The Tudor Crown. Later, in The Lady of the Ravens and The Queen’s Lady, she turned to Joan Vaux, a woman close to Elizabeth of York and the early Tudor court. In The House of Seymour, she moves to Wolf Hall and the earlier generations of the family long before their name becomes famous.

What readers often find in Hickson's fiction is not just crowns and battles, but rooms. Chapels, nurseries, chambers, fortified houses, river landings, cold corridors. She tends to write about women who stand close to power, sometimes queens, sometimes ladies, sometimes companions or widows, and she keeps one eye on the work of daily life: service, childbirth, travel, negotiation, grief, gossip and endurance.

She now writes full time and lives in a farmhouse in Wiltshire that dates back to the fifteenth century. It is an apt base for a novelist who seems happiest in the long, messy stretch between the Wars of the Roses and the early Tudors. Her books keep returning there, not to turn history into pageant, but to ask what loyalty, ambition, love and survival felt like when the future was still unknown.