In the backdrop of Sri Lanka’s 2025 Galle Literary Festival, we sat with bestselling author Kate Mosse to learn more about her writing process, her books’ exploration of historical and feminist themes, and the path that originally led her through France and South Africa alongside her characters in The Joubert Family Chronicles.
Kate Mosse has been writing fiction and non-fiction since the early 1990s. Best known for her 2005 novel Labyrinth, her creative career includes novels, short stories, plays, and more. She has long been an advocate of the hidden people in history, particularly where the presence of women was either obscured or eliminated altogether, and this is represented in her publications as well as her philanthropic work. Online, she may be seen encouraging others to talk more about the #WomenInHistory whose stories should be better known, touching on the impact of AI on intellectual property, or gently pushing new writers to finally finish their first drafts.
What inspired you to embark on writing the Joubert Family Chronicles, and how did you develop the idea for this series?
All of my fiction is inspired by a sense of time and place, a sense of the stories that might be told there, and the drawing together of history and mystery and human nature. I don’t know when the voices will speak to me, but I always feel what I call the ‘whispering in the landscape.’ It doesn’t happen everywhere.
When I went to the Franschhoek Literary Festival in South Africa. I didn’t know anything about the history of the region of the Western Cape. As I was being driven from the airport, I saw a sign at the side of the road that said Languedoc, which is the region I write about in Southwest France. Then I saw that many of the wine farms had French names. I thought this was very strange, because I knew nothing about French history in the Cape at the time.
When we arrived, the main street was called Huguenot Road. The Huguenot were a group of Protestant refugees who were persecuted during the wars of religion in France from the 16th century to the 17th century, and they fled all over the world in order to survive. In Franschhoek, I learnt that 400 of them came to the Cape and played a large role in founding the South African wine industry.
After discovering all of this, I went to the Huguenot graveyard. Standing there, I had a clear image of a woman in a 19th century dress leaning forward to rub the lichen from a gravestone to see who was buried there. At that moment, I heard the whispering, and I thought, “Oh, no, I’m gonna have to write and find out who she is, and who is in the ground.”
In the last novel of the series, in The Map of Bones, I got the answer.
Given the series’ extensive historical scope, what research methods did you employ to ensure historical accuracy and depth in your storytelling?
My passion and respect for history is immense. Three quarters of the time I spend on my books is in research, and writing itself is a sprint. When I’m writing, I start very early in the day, about four o’clock in the morning, and I write for eight or nine hours, seven days a week, until I have a first draft because I trust my instinct. I need to write the novel to know what the novel is about. And then the hard work begins.
I have foot research and head research. The head research involves reading from all of the experts, be they military historians, social historians, or theologians, about my period, so that the expert voices are in my head.
I then spend a great deal of time in archives. Since I’m an instinctive writer, the sight of a letter from the 17th century is more likely to inspire me than text on a computer screen. I spend a lot of time in libraries, but also museums and art galleries, because looking at paintings of the time helps me see what I feel is the charisma of things.
My foot research is obviously the fun part. In these 12 years of writing, I went to Stellenbosch and Franschhoek every year. I consider this part of respecting the place, and respecting the people.
I write fast-moving adventure stories for my readers, but if I say that the sun came up behind the wrong mountain because I’ve never seen it, they will know. It’s historical fiction, so I can’t be there at the right time, but I can respect the physicality of the place. There are many brilliant writers who never go to the places they write about. They do a brilliant job, but for all writers it’s about finding our own technique and then leaning into that. There’s no one writer who is the same as another.
Women’s history is difficult because women’s voices have often been silenced and materials not saved, but we know that women were there. It’s like being a detective when you write, inspired by the history of women, most of which has been lost or overlooked. You can’t do a linear path, you might have to go backwards and forwards and build up a picture.
The series features strong female protagonists across generations. How do you approach crafting these characters, and what influenced their development?
I will slightly giggle when people say that my characters are strong female characters, because I’m tempted to ask, “Have you not met any women?”
You know, all women are strong! Nobody ever asks me to create strong male characters, because that’s taken for granted. But, in fact, they’re two sides of the same coin. I write real women who could have lived, and they are strong, but the men I write best are mostly the gentle men, because I think patriarchy isn’t about men versus women. It never has been. It’s about a few lunatics with power against the rest of us. Women and men built the world together, and we were always in it together. So what about all the gentle, quiet men who didn’t want to go to war, who didn’t want to be the alpha hero? These men are often overlooked in literature and in the world.
It’s important to me to show this. In all of my books, I have women who are wonderful and women who are awful. And men who are awful and men who are wonderful, because that’s the reality of things.
In terms of how I create them, I start by doing all of my research. Then I sit alone in an empty room and wait for the characters to come to me. I never think, “Oh, I’m gonna write this sort of person or that sort of person.” I know the type that is likely to turn up, but this is how I met Suzanne in the 17th century, and Isabelle in the 19th century, in the Joubert Family Chronicles.
How has your pitch changed from your first book to today, with the entire series published? How do new readers find you today?
What I have learnt, as a former editor and someone who has been battling in words for more than 40 years, is that every story can be boiled down to a couple of sentences. None of us feel that, because we know that the joy of the writing and the joy for the reader will be complexity, the beauty of the language and metaphors and the incredibly clever ideas we hope we’re coming up with.
Labyrinth, which is my best known book, is a Christian Grail story, but it’s also about a much more ancient mystery that belongs to all religions. It’s also about a woman in 13th century Carcassonne and a woman in the present day. They are connected, and there are parallel stories that go backwards and forwards. In the end, however, it’s a novel about how the real Grail is the love we carry within us for other people—in the way the stories are carried on. But in terms of the page, it was ‘three books, two women, one Grail.’
With The Map of Bones, the pitch is very straightforward again. ‘Two women. The birth of a new nation. Pioneers.’ The one before, which people really love, is called The Ghost Ship, and that’s about queer pirates. I don’t need to say anything else.
People think it’s interesting that many women in the era of piracy disguised themselves as men and went to sea and often fell in love with women. But the book is much more complicated than that. It’s about challenging slavery. It’s about enslavement. It’s about women’s place in the world. It’s a novel that I’m really proud of. But ultimately, all you need to say is ‘lesbian pirates.’ So that’s what you have to practise, just stripping away all the stuff that makes it yours.
How do you balance historical events with fictional narratives to create a compelling and believable story?
I write imagined characters against the backdrop of real history. I know my world backwards. I know everything about it. Probably about 70 percent of my research stays in the file, and very little goes onto the page, because my job is not to prove I’ve done my research. My job is to create a brilliant world in historically accurate terms. Still, the reader just knows I know what I’m talking about. It’s why I have a lot of male readers as well as female readers.
I do have one or two real people in my novels, but I’m very careful not to put words into their mouths. I have a very active imagination, but I cannot know precisely what a man in the 17th century who was Dutch and had been sent to the other side of the world was thinking. The way that I write a real character must be respectful of the real person who lived and died, so most of my characters are people who could have lived, inspired by the years of research that I’ve done.
But it’s very important, if you write historical fiction, that it doesn’t get in the way of the story. If the reader is thinking, “Good grief, Kate Mosse has done great research,” then I’ve failed.
Religious conflict and displacement are central themes in your series. What parallels do you see between the historical events you depict and contemporary issues?
It is important as a writer of historical fiction that you never put 21st century ideas, views, and language into the voices of your characters, because it is inappropriate. It also skews the reality of the history or you’re trying to bring to life.
When I started writing the Joubert Family Chronicles, there was not a world refugee crisis. I never set out to write a refugee series. It started with one woman and one gravestone.
However, your job as a novelist, and as a writer, in general terms, is to leave enough white space around your work that the reader can put their own self into the reading of the book. Once a book is published, it belongs as much to the readers as it does to the writer, in my opinion.
Historical fiction, in particular, is about dealing with the emotions that are engendered in all of us about these parallel situations. So if someone is reading the first book in The Joubert Family Chronicles, they might well look at how neighbours, having lived alongside each other for all of these years, being of different faiths, different points of view, can be turned into enemies. So that’s the point. I’m not writing about anything contemporary, but the emotions we feel and the questions we ask are the same.
That’s why I’m so passionate about the power of fiction, because I think people care about the characters. They can think about contemporary issues with a slightly different point of view.
Your novels often explore the concept of identity amidst adversity. What message do you hope readers take away regarding personal and cultural identity?
I care passionately about respecting people of different ethnicities, different countries, different religions. My subjects are war and the consequences of war and faith. Of course, at the heart of it is lost women’s narratives, but I write to entertain. What I want people to do is say, “God, love that book, couldn’t put it down.” That is the biggest compliment: that somebody has used their valuable time in the company of my characters.
I wouldn’t presume to say what I think they should take away, but if I had to pick: Tolerance.
The only way the majority of people can have a good world is to learn to respect and admire people you don’t agree with, not just the people you do. So tolerance, and also hope, that they should always look behind the headlines.
If I had a pound in money for every person who said to me, “Yeah, but women didn’t…”
In my book, Warrior Queens & Quiet Revolutionaries, which puts a thousand women back into history from all over the world, I will say they did. Women were not missing in the living of History. They’ve been missing in the writing of History.
In the period I write about in the Jourbert Family Chronicles, the men were away at war for a generation. So who do we think were the doctors? Who do we think were ringing the bells and baking the bread and binding the books?
What were some of the most significant challenges you faced while writing the series and how did you overcome them?
With every book I write, and this is advice I give to students, I think about the first sentence. And then the next sentence. Before you know it, you have a paragraph. And then think about the next paragraph, and the next thing you know, you have a chapter.
All writers struggle. We all reach a point where we’re fed up with the book.
You must get a first draft and keep writing. Too many new writers rework at the beginning because they want it to be perfect. There won’t be time for that. Get a whole first draft out, and I live by that myself. When I think I am not feeling a scene, and I say that to students as well: if you’re losing the joy a bit and it seems like a ride, try writing a draft of the scene you’re looking forward to. The big wedding, say or the funeral where the long lost brother arrives and destroys everything!
In the edit, you can make it all fit together, but just keep going and understand that everybody feels it. I’ve sold millions of copies, and I feel it. Somebody who hasn’t published yet feels it; our emotions as writers are the same. That’s the only difference, that I am published and they are not—yet.
How have readers’ responses to the series influenced your perspective on these historical periods and themes you’ve explored?
People have enjoyed my books; I write to entertain, but it doesn’t make me change my view, usually.
One exception happened with Warrior Queens & Quiet Revolutionaries, my last non-fiction book. There were nearly a thousand women in the book, but there was an example where a police officer came up to say she was disappointed there wasn’t a police officer in the book. I realized that was true, so I went back, did some research and discovered who the very first warrant police officer was in the UK, and I put her in.
Those things do make a difference.
Another example is when experts reach out. With my novel, Labyrinth, there was a Professor of Linguistics from the University of Tel Aviv who wrote to me and said, “I loved Labyrinth. I loved that there were Muslim characters and Jewish characters, and that you have told people about the huge schools of Jewish learning that were in France and nobody realizes.” He said, “but I just need to tell you this: the Jews of Southern France spoke in Hebrew, not Yiddish, until 1260.”
My novel finished in 1244. That’s so tiny, and I’d not picked that up in any of my research. I immediately thanked him, and I corrected it.
So it’s not me changing my view, it’s readers letting me know I’ve got something wrong, and I value that because I am very highly researched, but I’m not an expert in the medieval language of Jewish communities and so on.
Are there any historical periods or events that you haven’t yet written about but are eager to explore in your future books?
Oh yes, loads and loads, but I suspect I’m interested in the early years of the 20th century—the years between the wars of the 20th century. I’ve always been attracted to that, partly because there are so many extraordinary British composers from that time, and partly due to the consequences of the First World War and how it changed the world in a way that no conflict oddly had in the modern era.
That period attracts me, but as yet the whispering hasn’t started.