Katherine Roberts

Katherine Roberts won the inaugural Branford Boase award for her first novel Song Quest (Element, 1999), which launched her career as a children’s author. She was a member of the British Fantasy Society for many years and continues to be inspired by the genre, particularly where it overlaps with history and ancient religion. She enjoys creating new legends from old, such as her Pendragon Legacy quartet (Templar, 2012–13) about King Arthur’s fictional daughter.

In 2011, Katherine took advantage of Amazon’s Kindle direct publishing platform to republish her out-of-print backlist titles as ebooks, and co-founded the Authors Electric indie-publishing blog with fellow children’s author Susan Price. Her short fiction has been published in a variety of magazines, and her fantasy story ‘Under the Eyemoon’ won the Broadsword fiction-of-the-year award in 1996. During this period, she also wrote a fantasy and science-fiction module for the Quality Women’s Fiction correspondence course.

Before becoming a professional author, Katherine obtained a first-class honours degree in mathematics from Bath University and worked as a computer programmer, gaining skills that have helped her with publishing her ebooks and print-on-demand paperbacks in recent years. She also worked with racehorses in various National Hunt racing stables and helped her husband with his horse-transport business, which gave her an insight into horse behaviour that resulted in her book I am the Great Horse (Chicken House, 2006) about Alexander the Great told through the eyes of his horse. In 2015, she launched a signature list under the name ‘Katherine A Roberts’ to publish some of her historical fiction for older readers. She is currently working on her first adult novel.