Award-winning author Julia Ibbotson is fascinated by the medieval world and concepts of time. Can the past tell us something about our present? Is there some kind of connection across the ages? Have you ever experienced that feeling of past lives embedded in the fabric of a building? Does time blend from the historic past to the present? 

Back in the day, Julia read English at Keele University, England, specialising in medieval language / literature / and history, and has a PhD in linguistics.

She first worked in Ghana, West Africa, where she spent a turbulent but exciting time teaching and nursing.

She wrote her first novel at 10 years of age, but then became a school teacher, university lecturer and researcher. Julia has published both academic works and fiction, including two series of medieval (Anglo-Saxon) mysteries: the Dr DuLac series (A Shape on the Air, The Dragon Tree, The Rune Stone, so far!) and now the Dr Anna Petersen dual-time / timeslip mysteries: starting with Daughter of Mercia. She has also written a children’s book S.C.A.R.S (a fantasy medieval time slip), a memoir, and the Drumbeats trilogy (which begins in Ghana in the 1960s).

Apart from insatiable reading, Julia loves travelling the world, singing in choirs, swimming, yoga, book club, voluntary work, and walking in the English countryside and through the Madeiran laurisilva forests and levadas. She and her husband  divide their time between the UK and Madeira.