On this episode of the Authors of History Podcast I am joined by award winning historian and author Helen Castor.

Helen Castor is a historian of the later middle ages and sixteenth century. She studied for her BA and PhD at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, and was elected to a Research Fellowship at Jesus College, Cambridge, in 1993.

Helen has presented programmes for BBC television, Channel 4 and BBC Radio, including Radio 4’s Making History, and documentaries based on She-Wolves and Joan of Arc for BBC Four and BBC Two.

Her book Blood & Roses is a biography of the fifteenth-century Paston family, whose remarkable letters are the earliest surviving collection of private correspondence in the English language. Blood & Roses was longlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction in 2005, and was awarded the Beatrice White Prize (for outstanding scholarly work in the field of English Literature before 1590) by the English Association in 2006.

Helen's next book, She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth, was widely selected as one of the books of the year for 2010. In 2014, her book Joan of Arc: A History, was selected as one of the books of the year in the Sunday Times, Times, Guardian, Telegraph, Mail on Sunday and the Evening Standard, and longlisted for the PEN America/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography in 2015.

Her most recent book, The Eagle and the Hart: The Tragedy of Richard II and Henry IV, was published in 2024 to great acclaim. It was longlisted for the Women's Prize for Non-Fiction in 2025, shortlisted for the Elizabeth Longford Prize for Historical Biography in 2025, and named the Telegraph's Best Book of the Year for 2024 and shortlisted for the Wolfson History prize.

In 2022 Helen was part of the judging for the Booker prize.

Helen Castor excels at bringing complex medieval narratives to life, focusing on powerful women, social mobility, political intrigue, and the human stories behind major historical events like the Wars of the Roses and the reigns of Richard II and Henry IV. 

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