5 minutes with...KATE MOSSE

Location is everything to the British novelist

Where did your love of historical fiction come from?

I've always been passionate about history and curious about how people lived in the past. I grew up reading authors like Rider Haggard, Jean Plaidy, Robert Graves and Mary Renault. I love how, with historical adventure, you can bring the past to life and also shine a light on the present.

What inspired this latest novel, and did you know it would be a series when you started writing it?

The Ghost Ship is the third of four novels in The Joubert Family Chronicles. I planned to write a series of adventure novels spanning 300 years of history - from the outbreak of the wars of religion in France in 1562, a story of a feud between two families and their descendants, and ending in Franschhoek in South Africa. Each is inspired by one of the elements - fire, water and, for The Ghost Ship, air. More than that, I'd always wanted to write a pirate novel, ever since reading the story of two incredible female pirates, Anne Bonny and Mary Read, who lived as men and ruled the Caribbean in the early 18th century.