The Wild Hunt

AUTHOR'S NOTE

My first conscious memory of telling stories goes back to very early childhood. I was three years old, sitting up in bed on a light summer evening, making up a tale about the fairies decorating my cotton handkerchief.

Throughout my childhood I entertained myself by inventing stories, generally based on visual prompts from illustrations in books, or from memories of TV programmes I had enjoyed.

Champion the Wonder Horse was responsible for many an afternoon of involved imagining. At this stage in my life, the tale-telling was always verbal and it wasn't until I was fourteen that I began writing things down - inspired to do so by summer holiday boredom and the BBC's Six Wives of Henry VIII starring Keith Michell e as Henry. However, although I enjoyed the writing, my Tudor tale didn't go the distance and was really just a sampler piece.

The following year the BBC aired the children's TV programme Desert Crusader, dubbed from the French series Thibaud ou les Croisades and set in the Holy Land in the twelfth century. I felll hook, line and sinker for the leading actor, Andre Laurence, and immediately began to write my own crusading novel. This time I persevered and completed it, realising along the way that I had found my period and my niche. I wanted to write historical adventures for a living - preferably medieval!

It took me another seventeen years and eight full-length novels to achieve that ambition, but I never gave up or saw rejections as a waste. It was all a learning curve and still fun to do. The Wild Hunt was the novel that finally gained me both a literary agent and a publisher. It also won me a Betty Trask award, which is an award given to authors under the age of thirty-five for a first novel of a romantic or traditional nature. The year I won, the award was presented by H.R. H. The Prince of Wales at Whitehall. This was a somewhat surreal moment for me as six months previously I had been stacking shelves at the local supermarket to make ends meet while raising my family!

The Wild Hunt has gone on to sell around the world and has been translated into a dozen languages. However, due to the vagaries of the publishing industry, it went out of print in English for many years. When Sphere wanted to reissue it, I was thrilled, but I said that in the light of increased writerly experience and with a bit more historical knowledge under my belt, I would like to go through the novel and give it a spring clean, so to speak.

The Wild Hunt was the first step on the rung of my career as a professional full -time author, and since then I have moved from writing tales of imaginary historical characters set against authentic backdrops, into telling, as fiction, the stories of people who actually lived. However, I remain very fond of this, my first published novel. I hope that my established readers will enjoy revisiting this reworked version and that those who have not come across The Wild Hunt before will be delighted too.