Kate Mosse is the author of nine novels & short story collections, including the No 1 bestselling The Joubert Family Chronicles – The Burning Chambers and The City of Tears – as well as the multimillion selling Languedoc Trilogy – Labyrinth, Sepulchre and Citadel – and No 1 bestselling Gothic fiction including The Winter Ghosts and The Taxidermist’s Daughter, which she adapted for the stage for 2022. Her books have been translated into 38 languages and published in more than 40 countries. Her latest book, part detective story, part family history and part dictionary of 1000 women missing from history – Warrior Queens & Quiet Revolutionaries: How Women (Also) Built the World – was published in 2022. She has also written three others works of non-fiction – including An Extra Pair of Hands (Wellcome Collection, 2021) – four plays, contributed essays and introductions to classic novels and collections. Her novel for Quick Reads, The Black Mountain, came out in April 2022 and she’s one of twelve writers contributing a story to a new Miss Marple Collection of Short Stories – Marple – which published in 2022.
A champion of women’s creativity, Kate is the Founder Director of the Women’s Prize for Fiction – the largest annual celebration of women’s writing in the world – and sits on the Executive Committee of Women of the World. She is the Founder of the global campaign – #WomanInHistory – launched in January 2021 to honour, celebrate and promote women’s achievements throughout history and from every corner of the world. She was awarded an OBE in 2013 for services to literature and women and was named Woman of the Year for her service to the arts in the Everywoman Awards and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. She is a regular guest on book & arts shows on radio and television. She also writes and presents documentaries. To celebrate her 60th birthday, she launched her own YouTube book channel – Kate-Mosse-on-Books – with a monthly show ‘Mosse on a Monday’.
Kate hosts the pre performance interview series at Chichester Festival Theatre in Sussex, chairs Platform Events for the National Theatre in London, as well as interviewing writers, directors, campaigners and actors at literary and theatre festivals in the UK and beyond. Kate was awarded a Fellowship at the Writer’s House in Amsterdam in 2019. She is also Professor of Creative Writing & Contemporary Fiction at the University of Chichester.
Kate lives full-time in Chichester, though visits Carcassonne whenever possible. She is currently preparing a theatre tour for Warrior Queens & Quiet Revolutionaries for Spring 2023 and working on the third novel in The Joubert Family Chronicles, a historical crime thriller set in 17th century France, Tenerife and South Africa for publication in July 2023.
In 2019, Kate was honoured to be presented with a medal for services to culture by the City of Carcassonne. It is because of buying a tiny house in the shadow of the medieval city walls of Carcassonne in 1989 – and becoming inspired by the landscape, the beauty and the history of the region – that Kate became the writer she is.
1. Eunice Newton Foote https://www.climate.gov/news-features/features/happy-200th-birthday-eunice-foote-hidden-climate-science-pioneer
2. The first ever statue to a female football player https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/55884099
3. There are more statues in Edinburgh to animals than to women https://inews.co.uk/news/uk/campaign-seeks-change-fact-edinburgh-statues-animals-women-58867
4. Josephine Cochrane https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/time-saving-patent-paved-way-modern-dishwasher-180967656/
5. 14% of blue plaques are to women https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/blue-plaques/blue-plaque-stories/women-pioneers/
6. Women were only allowed to receive degrees in 1919 https://historicengland.org.uk/research/inclusive-heritage/womens-history/visible-in-stone/university/
Better Known 