Philippa Gregory

Available for over a year

Rana Mitter talks to the best-selling novelist Philippa Gregory about writing historical fiction and her fascination with the Tudors, recorded at the Radio 3 Free Thinking Festival. Philippa Gregory's fiction turns the spotlight on the lives of women at significant moments in history. Her Tudor series of novels includes The Other Boleyn Girl, which became a Hollywood film, and her most recent collection is set during the War of the Roses, England's epic power struggle between the Houses of Lancaster and York. BBC1 have now turned these novels into a major drama series The White Queen. In an event recorded at Radio 3's Free Thinking Festival at The Sage Gateshead in November 2012 in front of a live audience, Philippa Gregory reveals why she went from academia to fiction, how her approach to Tudor characters such as Thomas Cromwell differs from other historial novelists such as Hilary Mantel, whose Wolf Hall won the Man Booker prize, and why she can't help interfering with drama scripts of her novels. First broadcast in December 2012.