I am fascinated by Nesta’s family, the Tewdwrs. My first novel, The Siren’s Daughter, begins as the descendants of Rhys ap Tewdwr have lost their kingdom of Deheubarth in West Wales to the Norman Conquest. This family somehow survived the hundreds of years of war and rebellion which followed, through the long brutalisation of Wales – until they rose up one last time, managed to seize the throne of England … and began calling themselves the Tudors.

I focus particularly on the women of the Tewdwr family, who have amazing and historically accurate stories to tell. Women are absent from most of the formal chronicles in the medieval era, but traces of their lives remain in the records. Instead, women’s stories, and storytelling, were largely oral. In my first novel, wanted to create a story which was, at least in part, an oral narration from one woman to another – sharing the craft of verbal storytelling which would have been such an integral part of these women’s lives. So that’s how the story is told in The Siren’s Daughter: from Nesta to her daughter, Angharad, over the bleak midwinter months of 1126 when they were trapped inside Cardigan Castle in the chaotic aftermath of the Norman Conquest of Wales.

In summer 2026, I will begin work on the sequel to The Siren’s Daughter, set in 1136 during the initial battles of the Anarchy, the civil war which consumed both England and Wales. The book’s main protagonists will be an adult Angharad and her aunt, Gwenllian, the leader of the Welsh rebel army.

I feel blessed and privileged to be able to write about the extraordinary true stories of the Tewdwr women.