456-1000CE

Vikings, Danes, Saxons and everything in between. Feast your eyes on stories from the Dark Ages.

Matthew Harffy

Matthew Harffy lived in Northumberland as a child and the area had a great impact on him. The rugged terrain, ruined castles and rocky coastline made it easy to imagine the past. Decades later, a documentary about Northumbria's Golden Age sowed the kernel of an idea for a series of historical fiction novels. The first of them is the action-packed tale of vengeance and coming of age, THE SERPENT SWORD.

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Matthew has worked in the IT industry, where he spent all day writing and editing, just not the words that most interested him. Prior to that he worked in Spain as an English teacher and translator. Matthew lives in Wiltshire, England, with his wife and their two daughters.

Tim Hodkinson

Tim Hodkinson was born in 1971 in Northern Ireland. He studied Medieval English and Old Norse Literature at University with a subsidiary in Medieval European History. He has been writing all his life and has a strong interest in the historical, the mystical and the mysterious. After spending several happy years living in New Hampshire, USA, he has now returned to life in Northern Ireland with his wife Trudy and three lovely daughters in a village called Moira.

Tim is currently working on a series of viking novels for Ares Fiction, an imprint of Head of Zeus and Bloomsbury.

Angus Donald

Angus Donald is the author of the bestselling Outlaw Chronicles, a series of nine novels set in the 12th/13th centuries and featuring a gangster-ish Robin Hood and his loyal lieutenant Sir Alan Dale. His latest Outlaw Chronicles instalment is "Robin Hood and the Caliph's Gold". Angus has also written the Holcroft Blood trilogy about a mildly autistic 17th-century artillery officer, who was the son of notorious Crown Jewel thief Colonel Thomas Blood, and an epic Asian fantasy novel "Gates of Stone" under the pseudonym Angus Macallan.

Before becoming an author, Angus worked as a fruit-picker in Greece, a waiter in New York and as an anthropologist studying magic and witchcraft in Indonesia. For many years he was a journalist in Hong Kong, India, Afghanistan and London. He is married to Mary, with whom he has two children, and he now writes full time from a medieval farmhouse in Kent.

Eric Schumacher

Eric Schumacher exists in the space between the medieval past and the not-so-distant future. By day, he is a brand storyteller and PR consultant for early stage video game and tech companies. By night, he wanders into the past, using known history and fiction to create stories about people living in turbulent times, especially the Viking Age. Schumacher was born and raised in Los Angeles, hardly the epicenter of medieval history. Yet even from the earliest age, he can remember devouring books about castles and warrior kings and Tolkien's Middle Earth, or playing Dungeons & Dragons with his first edition D&D manuals late into the night. That fascination, coupled with a love of writing, led him to the completion of Hakon’s Saga, a Viking historical fiction series set in 10th century Norway.

The novels, which are published by Legionary Books (an imprint of Next Chapter Publishing), tell the story of the Norwegian king, Hakon Haraldsson (or Hakon the Good) and his struggles to win, unify and protect what was not yet then Norway. He is now hard at work on his next series, Olaf’s Saga. The first novel in that series, Forged by Iron, was published in the spring of 2020. The second novel, Sigurd’s Swords, released in June 2021. Eric Schumacher frequently shares information about his writing, special offers, or interesting topics from history. To follow along, visit his website and join his Readers Club.

Griff Hosker

For over 35 years, Griff was an English teacher. After running a successful Educational Consultancy company for four years, he decided to return to an early passion, writing. With a love of the works of C.S Forester, Simon Scarrow, Ben Kane, Alexander Kent and Bernard Cornwell, he began writing his Roman historical fiction novels, the Sword of Cartimandua

Following on from that, Griff has written a number of series, from his Roman Books, through Saxons, Viking, Norman, Stephen and Matilda, The Crusades, King John and King Richard II. More series materialised about Henry Vth and Agincourt. He has also written an American Civil War series as well as novels based on the Napoleonic War. Two of his more recent series are set in World War I and World War II. The former is about the RFC and the latter about the Commandos.

Recently he has collaborated with Endeavour Quill on a series about King Edward I. The 1st novel in the series is Lord Edward's Archer.

Griff writes at least 5000 words each day and he loves his life as a writer, so expect many more books to come.

Johanna Wittenberg

Johanna Wittenberg is the author of The Norsewomen Series. Like her Viking forebears, she has sailed to the far reaches of the world. She now lives on a fjord in the Pacific Northwest with her husband, whom she met on a ship bound for Antarctica.

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The Norsewomen series is inspired by the life of Åsa Haraldsdottir, a queen who ruled in the early Viking Age. The sources barely mention Åsa, yet she is a woman who managed to take vengeance on her father’s murderer, seize control of her ancestral kingdom, and rule alone for twenty years during the most tumultuous time of Norse history. The Norsewomen imagines her life story, based on archaeological evidence and a deep understanding of the Norse culture.

Chris Thorndycroft

Chris Thorndycroft developed a fascination with medieval history after seeing Errol Flynn’s swashbuckling antics in The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) at the age of six. His obsession later found an outlet in creative writing and he has now written nine historical novels including the Hengest and Horsa Trilogy and the Arthur of the Cymry Trilogy which are set in 5th century Arthurian Britain as well as Lords of the Greenwood and Rotherwood: A Prequel to Ivanhoe, both of which look at the origins of Robin Hood.

Born in Portsmouth, England, Chris has lived in the Netherlands and Wales before settling in Norway with his wife, two kids and a couple of cats.

MJ Porter

I’m an author of fantasy (Viking age/dragon themed) and historical fiction (Early English, Vikings and the British Isles as a whole before the Norman Conquest), born in the old Mercian kingdom at some point since the end of 1066. Raised in the shadow of a strange little building and told from a very young age that it housed the bones of long-dead kings of Mercia, it’s little wonder that my curiosity in the early English ran riot. I can only blame my parents! I write A LOT. You’ve been warned!