Alison Weir

Alison Weir calls herself a popular historian rather than an academic one, and the description is fair: she studied history at what is now London Metropolitan University, trained as a teacher, and ran a school for children with learning difficulties from 1991 to 1997. The Six Wives of Henry VIII, published in 1991, fixed her subject for good. Fiction came in 2006, and Captive Queen (2010) takes Eleanor of Aquitaine and her marriage to Henry II. Katherine of Aragón: The True Queen opened the Six Tudor Queens sequence in 2016, a novel for each wife in turn, and Katharine Parr, the Sixth Wife closed it in 2021 with the queen who outlived Henry VIII and went on to marry Thomas Seymour.