Elizabeth Chadwick

Elizabeth Chadwick (born 1957) is an author of historical fiction. She is a member of Regia Anglorum, a medieval reenactment organisation. Elizabeth Chadwick was born in Bury, Lancashire in 1957. She moved with her family to Scotland when she was four years old and spent her childhood in the village of Newton Mearns near Glasgow. She came to Nottingham when she was ten and has lived there ever since. She has told herself stories all of her life, but didn't actually write anything down until she was fifteen. Her first foray into historical fiction, a novel about the Holy Land in the twelfth century, led her to the realisation that she wanted to write historical fiction for a living.

In 1989, after years of writing and rejections during which her works won some competitions, a literary agent became interested in The Wild Hunt, one of her books. The book was auctioned to Michael Joseph, part of Penguin Group. A year later the book won a Betty Trask Award, which was presented to the author at Whitehall by the Prince of Wales.

Elizabeth Chadwick has gone on to become one of Britain's foremost historical novelists and has been called by the Historical Novel Society "the best writer of medieval fiction currently around". She is published internationally, and her work has been translated into 16 languages. Chadwick is renowned for her extensive research into the medieval period and particularly so in the area of the Marshal and Bigod families. Her novels about the thirteenth-century magnate William Marshal, The Greatest Knight (2005) and The Scarlet Lion (2006), have brought her international acclaim.