Katie Hickman

Katie Hickman is a highly acclaimed novelist, historian and travel writer. She is the author of nine books, including two bestselling history books, Daughters of Britannia: the lives and times of British diplomatic wives, and Courtesans, a study of British eighteenth- and nineteenth-century women of pleasure, which between them have sold more than a quarter of a million copies worldwide. Daughters of Britannia was adapted into a twenty-part series for Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour. Her other works include a bestselling novel, The Aviary Gate, the first in a trilogy of novels set in seventeenth-century Constantinople, Venice and London. Her books have been translated into more than twenty languages. Katie Hickman was born into a diplomatic family, and spent the first twenty years of her life living abroad, an experience that gave her a lifelong interest in both travel and in the role of women in other cultures. Her first book, Dreams of the Peaceful Dragon: a journey into Bhutan, is the story of a journey on horseback across the forbidden Himalayan Kingdom of Bhutan. Her other books have included an account of a year spent with a travelling circus in Mexico, a history of British women in India, and a study of nineteenth-century emigrant women in the American West. Katie Hickman combined her life as a traveller and a writer with bringing up two children. She lives in London with her partner, the designer Matthew Ruscombe-King, on a converted barge on the Thames.