Karen Maitland has an honours degree in Human Communication and a 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.

Karen 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. She now lives in the splendid medieval city of Lincoln.

Authors Books