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John Broughton

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John Broughton

Award-winning author, John Broughton was born in Cleethorpes Lincolnshire UK in 1948: just one of the post-war baby boomers. After attending grammar school and studying to the sound of Bob Dylan he went to Nottingham University and studied Medieval and Modern History (Archaeology subsidiary). The subsidiary course led to one of his greatest academic achievements: tipping the soil content of a wheelbarrow from the summit of a spoil heap on an old lady hobbling past the dig, fortunately, they subsequently became firm friends. He did many different jobs while living in Radcliffe-on-Trent, Leamington, Glossop, the Scilly Isles, Puglia and Calabria. They include teaching English and History, managing a Day-Care Centre, being a Director of a Trade Institute and teaching university students English. He even tried being a fisherman and a flower picker when he was on St. Agnes Island, Scilly. He has lived in Calabria since 1992 where he settled into a long-term job, for once, at the University of Calabria teaching English. No doubt his lovely Calabrian wife Maria stopped him being restless.

His two kids are grown up now, but he wrote books for them when they were little. Hamish Hamilton and then Thomas Nelson published 6 of these in England in the 1980s. They are now out of print. He’s a granddad and happily the parents wisely named his grandson Dylan. He decided to take up writing again late in his career. You know when you are teaching and working as a translator you don’t really have time for writing. As soon as he stopped the translations, he resumed writing in 2014. The fruit of that decision was his first historical novel, The Purple Thread, published by Endeavour Media, London. The novel is set in his favourite Anglo-Saxon period. Subsequently, he has Published seventeen novels set between 450 and 1066 AD, including two trilogies, with Next Chapter Publishers. They also published Angenga a time-travel novel linking the ninth century to the twenty-first. This novel inspired John Broughton to write a series of novels about psychic investigator Jake Conley whose retrocognition takes him back to Anglo-Saxon times.

In order to put his writing versatility to the test, he embarked on a series of detective mystery novels set in London with the Metropolitan Police, who have to deal with a criminally insane serial killer in The Quasimodo Killings; The London Tram Murders and yet to be published, The Thames Crossbow Murders. Heartened by this venture, he decided to write an apocalyptic novel entitled The Remnant a science-fiction novel. However, he returned to his first love with a historical saga, Expulsion, about the expulsion of the Vikings from Dublin and the subsequent diaspora. This novel will be published soon in 2022.

IN THE AUTHOR’S WORDS

Author interview

Interview submitted .

What inspired you to start writing?

My children’s inexhaustible thirst for new stories at bedtime made me start writing. They devoured all the public library books and every new book I bought. What choice did I have? I wrote new stories for them, which their mum read in her primary classes and encouraged me to find a publisher. Hamish Hamilton obliged. Long hours of proofreading, translating and teaching prevented more writing, but upon retiring, I made up for lost time and wrote thirty novels for adults in eight years!

Who are some of your favorite authors and books?

Who is my favourite author? It’s like asking a child what is your favourite sweetie? There so many, so perhaps it’s surprising given the linguistic differences that I choose two American authors: Ernest Hemingway and Gore Vidal. Hemingway for his simplicity of style and complex lifestyle! The Old Man and the Sea. Vidal for the best historical novel – Julian. Back in Europe, The great Russians, Michael Sholokhov for his descriptions in And Quiet Flows the Don, Dostoevsky for the psychology in The Brothers Karamasov . Hermann Hesse for that, too in Steppenwolf. In my adopted land, Italy, Italo Calvino with Invisible Cities and my homeland, JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. As for poets, Byron, Keats and TS Eliot.

What would you like to tell readers who have just discovered your books, but haven't read one yet?

If you’d like to read my books, start with one of my trilogies. I suggest this because they both encapsulate my desire to immerse the reader in the lives of ordinary people in the Anglo-Saxon period. You can choose to follow a leatherworker and his successive generations in the St Cuthbert Trilogy or a deer herder and successive generations in the Sceapig Chronicles. Reviewers write that they were taken back in time and couldn’t separate reality from fiction, which is exactly what I wanted to achieve!

Who is the favorite character you created, and how did they come into being?

My favourite character I’ve created is Cynethryth. Let’s say ‘created’ because she’s semi-fictional, based on a real historical character. She’s my favourite for this reason because I had to invent her backstory. I’m dealing with the Dark Ages, so you have to free the imagination! Also, because it took some doing for a man to write a woman so convincingly that my female readership pleaded for a sequel to know what happened to her after the death of her mighty husband, King of Wessex. You can find Cynethryth in Wyrd of the Wolf and its sequel In the Name of the Mother.

What are your future plans as a writer?

Future plans as a writer? I’ve been diversifying from solely Anglo-Saxon novels recently. My corpus includes a work of fantasy Whirligig, a Sci-fi The Remnant, but also a detective mystery series the Vance and Shepherd books. A fourth of those would be good, plus I’ve not abandoned my first love: another Anglo-Saxon trilogy would be wonderful. I am tempted to stray beyond my usual bounds into the Byzantine world, too. I dipped my toes into that with Expulsion – about the Viking diaspora.

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