Ben Elliott

Ben Elliott is the pseudonym of an internationally best-selling traditionally-published author of fiction and non-fiction. He is also a film-maker who founded one of the first exclusively LGBTQ film/video companies in the UK in the early 1990s, producing the first-ever gay soap and first-ever on-screen gay detective. Ben Elliott has always been fascinated by the ancient world, particularly ancient Greece and Rome, and brings his extensive knowledge of the period into his historical fiction. Two of his favourite novelists are Mary RenaulIt and Rosemary Sutcliffe, writers on ancient Greece and Rome respectively. Gladiator School was written to prove to Ben’s agent, famous for discovering literary best-sellers, that he could write fiction as well as best-selling non-fiction. Ben Elliott likes to think of his LGBTQ ancient Roman novels as MM+ - stories of passion between men with the ‘plus’ of very steamy explicit sex scenes.

Ben Elliott can also think up his own titles and used the title Gladiator School long before any of its imitators. He also devised and wrote it before the announcement of the film Gladiator, although given the lead times of publishing books, they were launched around the same time May/June 2000. It was followed by a companion novel The Slave King (2002) which will also be published soon in ebook format.

As both writer and activist, Ben Elliott has campaigned for many years against the abuse of LGBTQ people in the Catholic Church