The official bio...

Katherine's debut novel, The Crimson Ribbon, was published in 2014 and her second, The Silvered Heart, in 2015. Her third novel, The Coffin Path, became an Amazon bestseller and was nominated for the HWA Gold Crown Award and The Guardian's Not the Booker Prize in 2018. Her writing has won and been shortlisted for many prizes, including the Winchester Writers' Conference First Three Pages Award and the Weald & Downland Museum/Jerwood Prize for Historical Fiction.


Katherine spent over two decades working in training and education and led the development and launch of the UK’s first A Level in Creative Writing. She spent three years as editor of Historia, the online magazine of the Historical Writers’ Association, and is a member of the HWA Committee. She’s a Royal Literary Fund Fellow, having held fellowships at both Sheffield and Manchester Universities, where she worked with students on academic writing. She was the first Royal Literary Fund Fellow in the History department at Manchester University.

In 2018 Katherine was awarded a prestigious Fulbright Scholar Award and spent a year living and working in New Orleans, while researching her next novel. She is based in West Yorkshire where, alongside her own writing projects, she works as a writing coach and mentor, and as editor of the Royal Literary Fund magazine Collected. She’s a qualified coach, has led workshops for hundreds of writers, both in person and online, and was lead tutor at the Historical Novel Society Academy where she launched the first online historical fiction masterclass programme.