The world this week is – among others – breaking its head over the power of private companies such as Twitter and Facebook when it comes to being a platform for undesirable and potentially dangerous opinions that lead to violence. That discussion is not new, of course, and as I’m in no way qualified to judge the rightness or wrongness of their decision to ban the president of the United States and others from further using their services, this blogpost is not about that. As authors we all know the importance of the algorithms that drive those sites. I for one am an author struggling with thi ..read more

Changing from contemporary fiction to historical fiction didn’t happen to me overnight and wasn’t a simple flip of the switch. It was the result of a long & conscious deliberation with myself. And I must admit I still, occasionally, have my doubts about HF. All the research, the essential tropes, the critical eyes from readers. The writing is so much slower and has to be so precise and time conscious. But despite it all, I stand by my choice and take the extra work in my stride. So far. I firmly believe in the power of the past to tackle the challenges of the future. And if I – as a fict ..read more

As authors we wouldn’t exist without readers. It’s as simple as that. So when I embarked on my historical fiction rebrand, I vowed to myself that I’d personally get to know my die-hard fans from the beginning and keep them in my orbit. Fans like Elisa Hordon are the making of Hannah Byron. I mean how can you resist a reader who compares your writing style to that of Barbra Taylor Bradford and Judith Krantz? On the happy day of the release of my second book in The Resistance girl Series, Elisa interviews me. Let me give the floor to my friend from down-under. My name is Elisa Hordon, I live i ..read more

What is NaNoWriMo and why does it work for me? Since 2011 I’ve been a member of NaNoWriMo, which stands for National Novel Writing Month. In the course of these 9 years I’ve participated 6 times and won it 4 times. Winning means writing 50,000 words in the 30 days of November aka 1,667 words per day. For some writers this is a piece of cake, for others – like me – quite a tough benchmark. In this blogpost I want to share some info on what NaNoWriMo is and why it works for me. See the pretty purple collar on my profile pic? That’s for being a 4-time winner. NaNoWriMo History NaNoWriMo was ac ..read more

I’m so excited now we’re heading fast towards 10 December when my second book in The Resistance Girl Series comes out. Time for The Diamond Courier. It’s on preorder now! The Diamond Courier was the book I initially started to write as my come-back book after the 2020 rebrand. For my first historical fiction series I wanted to concentrate on World War II as I – slightly tongue-in-cheek – always claim to be an indirect result of D-Day myself. Which is true. My uncle Tom Naylor, at the time engaged to my Mom’s eldest sister Beryl, landed of the beaches of Normandy in June 1944 and fought his w ..read more

A Finishing School… what is that? In the four books of The Resistance Girl Series – In Picardy’s Fields, The Diamond Courier, The Parisian Spy and The Norwegian Assassin – the main female characters all go to Le Manoir, a finishing school on Lake Geneva in Switzerland. Nowadays the whole concept of sending girls to a finishing schools to learn how to snap up a rich and important husband, seems sexist and out of date. If women need such skills as social courtesy, upper-class manners and knowledge of cultural traditions it would be to prepare them for their own future positions in society not ..read more

Part 1 – The powers at play before WW1. I’m in no way a history buff but for my novel ‘In Picardy’s Fields’ I did some modest research into the background of this large-scale conflict and would like to share my findings with you. I only blog about things that I find interesting and getting some perspective on that elusive war helps me to see the bigger picture and that of the apocalyptic decades that followed after. I hope my clarifications are of some help to you. Humanity and geopolitics have never been the same after the world was shaken up by the scale of its own capacity for des ..read more

On a sunny August day in 2019, I set out from my house in the south of Holland to Picardy in northern France to commemorate my great-uncle Jack Westcott, whose name is engraved on the Thiepval Memorial as one of the ‘Missing of the Somme’. I planned a weekend trip to Amiens & surroundings to see first-hand the battlefields where my novel In Picardy’s Fields takes place. All photos are my own. I visited many more places and memorials but for the sake of brevity I’ll concentrate on the Thiepval Memorial. I arrived there on the Friday afternoon and it was beautifully quiet; only a few peopl ..read more

Uncle Jack’s Fight in France 1915-1916​ My great-uncle Jack was born in 1891 in Stone, Kent, GB to the Irish Mary Ann Meehan and the English George Richard Westcott. He was their 6th child and three years later my grandmother Gertrude Helen was born as the youngest of the lot. They later moved to Gravesend, where my grandparents used to live and where I spent many delightful summer holidays. Before Jack enlisted on 13 January 1915, he was a grocery assistant. The ‘assistant’ makes it sound quite lowly but when I look at his face in the picture, I see a sweet, young man with a friendly counten ..read more

My Great-uncles William and Jack Westcott I’d like to take you on a tour of my personal connection with World War I. We will be visiting some archives and the Picardy region in northern France, where the various ‘Battles of the Somme’ took place between 1914-1918. It’s the subject matter of my novel In Picardy’s Fields, out in September 2020! How it all started My late mother, Helen Ferguson, was a keen amateur genealogist of both her own British/Irish ancestry and of the Dutch branch of my father’s family. At first, I did not share my mum’s fascination with stuffy archives and bone-dry Int ..read more