Maggie Freeman

I've always loved telling stories – as a child I'd make up stories for my sister and my cousins – and I wrote down the stories I made up for my sons when they were little.

My first published books were children's novels, and these led on to my writing primary literacy books for Collins and Oxford University Press. I really enjoyed the discipline of writing them, and of doing my best to make sure that children would enjoy and learn from them.

The research for these got me hooked on historical research, which I've used as a basis for my novels. My most recent one is THE WIVES OF KING CANUTE, "a tumultuous novel of passion, power and bloody revenge", set mainly in England in the early 1000s. Before that I wrote THE CLOCK-MENDER, set in Sweden, DAUGHTER OF THE SEA, about a fictional daughter of Sir Francis Drake, born to a beautiful slave girl in the Spice Islands, and CYMBERIE, republished as THE GIRL IN THE GREAT HOUSE, a heartbreaking tale of love and loss, in a great house in sixteenth century Essex.

I've written five little books for Ransom Publishing. They were great fun, particularly the fictional ones, The Mouse and the Magic Socks, Dragon Island and The Snow Wolf, brilliantly illustrated by Brian Fitzgerald.

What next? I'm revising a couple of novels I wrote some time ago – watch this space!