5 minutes with...KATE MOSSE

Location is everything to the British novelist

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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.