Robyn Young Books in Order

For medieval crusades and Templar intrigue: Brethren → Crusade → Requiem / The Fall of the Templars
For Robert Bruce and Scottish war politics: Insurrection → Renegade / Rebellion → Kingdom / Judgment
For Wars of the Roses and Renaissance intrigue: Sons of the Blood → Court of Wolves
For modern crime and Iowa-set suspense: The Fields → Original Sins

Robyn Young was born in Oxford in 1975 and grew up partly in the Midlands and partly in a fishing village in Devon. At school, an English teacher pushed her toward poetry and gave her a first taste of editing when she encouraged Young to work on a regional newspaper page.

Music came before novels. She sang in folk clubs as a teenager, spent time around touring bands at college, and for a while imagined she might become a music journalist. That background probably helps explain the snap and rhythm in her prose. She likes movement.

Then she took a suit-and-nametag job in a building society.

The work paid the bills, but it also made something clear. Several months into training for a career in finance, despite hating maths, she started writing a huge fantasy novel because she needed somewhere for all that bottled-up energy to go. It ran to around 350,000 words. It was not the book that made her name, but it taught her that writing was not a hobby she was going to drop.

The real turning point came in 2000, when a trip to Egypt changed the direction of her work. She came back captivated by the desert, the history and the people, started studying creative writing at the University of Sussex, and began work on Brethren. She later completed a master's degree there, with distinction, while researching and writing the novel that would become her breakthrough.

It took time.

Young spent seven years getting Brethren from idea to publication. There were agent rejections, publisher rejections, rewrites, teaching jobs and money worries along the way. An agent signed her just before graduation, and after one more deep rewrite the book finally sold. When Brethren appeared in 2006 it went into the Sunday Times top ten, and Crusade and Requiem confirmed that readers were ready to follow her deep into the medieval world.

Success did not lock her into one lane. In 2007 she was named one of Waterstones' twenty-five authors of the future, and she kept following the periods and pressure points that interested her most. Insurrection, Renegade and Kingdom turned to Robert Bruce and the Scottish Wars of Independence. Sons of the Blood and Court of Wolves pushed forward into the Wars of the Roses and Renaissance Europe, where Jack Wynter has to navigate family secrets, dangerous courts and a world starting to change shape.

Under the name Erin Young, she also moved into contemporary crime fiction with The Fields and Original Sins. Those books trade castles and crusades for Iowa cornfields, sheriff's offices and federal investigations, but the interests are familiar: power that hides itself well, institutions under strain, and people trying to do the right thing when loyalty pulls them sideways. Across her books, she tends to write about outsiders and unwilling insiders, people close enough to power to feel its pull, but never safe from it.

Young now lives and writes in Brighton. She has also collaborated on a World War II screenplay, and she has said that she still writes bad poetry, avoids maths and sings in the shower. That feels like the right note to end on. Serious about the work, not too solemn about herself.