Robert M. Kidd

Robert M. Kidd

I think archeologists, classical scholars and historians have an unhealthy suspicion of imagination and invention. But for historical novelists like me, it is our greatest strength. Imagination and invention isn’t just making it up. Any historical novelist worth their salt only begins the creative process after all the written sources of evidence, archaeology, experimental evidence, practical and logical implications have been borne in mind, sifted through and intellectually exhausted. Only then can the imagination be fired up and take flight. In Hilary Mantel’s Reith Lectures, she said that writers of historical fiction ‘Need to know ten times as much as they will ever tell.’ At its very best, historical fiction ought to be higher up the food chain, because it’s built on a solid foundation of fact and research. Historical novelists inhabit that hinterland between evidence and imagination. This liminal ground between these two worlds is what fires and excites me as a writer.

When Cato the Censor demanded that ‘Carthage must be destroyed,’ Rome did just that. In 146 BC Carthage was raised to the ground, its citizens sold into slavery and the fields where this once magnificent city had stood, ploughed by oxen. Carthage was erased from history.

That’s why I’m a novelist on a mission - to set the historical record straight! Our history of Hannibal’s wars with Rome is nothing short of propaganda, written by Greeks and Romans for their Roman clients. My hero, Sphax the Numidian, tells a different story!

When I’m not waging war with my pen, I like to indulge my passion for travel and hill walking, and like my hero, I too love horses. I live in Pembrokeshire, West Wales.