VOICING THE PAST

giving forgotten women their time in the sun – and a potential meeting with the Queen

- INTERVIEW: LAURA BENJAMIN

When the award-winning author Kristin Hannah flew to the UK to attend this year's Queen's Reading Room Festival, she deliberately avoided finding out anything about where she was going.

The history buff, who has written smash-hit novels including The Nightingale and The Women, was so excited that the festival organised by the literary charity was to be held at Chatsworth House in Derbyshire that she didn't want anything to take away from her initial impression of the 17th-century stately home.

"I hear it is really something," Kristin told us in this exclusive interview before the event, speaking from her home near Seattle. “I have purposely not gone online to research it as I want to experience it unaware the first time, because I have a feeling it will take my breath away.

"As a novelist but also as a reader, when you walk into those places, all these books you've read over time click into place and somehow it breathes life into the room in which you're standing. Suddenly you can imagine what it was like to be there in other time periods.”

Kristin took part in the festival alongside other famous authors including Dame Jilly Cooper, Richard Osman, Helen Fielding and Jojo Moyes.