Kate Mosse Bio

Mosse was born in Chichester and raised in Fishbourne, West Sussex, the eldest of three sisters born to a solicitor, Richard, and Barbara.

A keen reader from childhood, she went on to study English at New College, Oxford, and after graduating spent seven years in London publishing with Hodder and Stoughton, Century and Hutchinson, learning the business from the inside before deciding she wanted to write her own stories.

That career in publishing turned out to matter: she arrived at her own fiction with a clear-eyed understanding of how the industry worked, and a sense of what was missing from it.

In the early 1990s Mosse left full-time publishing, started a family and turned to writing, beginning with non-fiction.

She became a published author in 1993 with Becoming a Mother, and her first novel, Eskimo Kissing, followed in 1996.

The biotech thriller Crucifix Lane came in 1998.

Both novels found an audience, and it was what came next that put her name on bookshelves across the world.

Labyrinth, published in 2005, changed everything.

The novel is an archaeological mystery set both in the Middle Ages and present-day France, divided into two main storylines that follow two protagonists, Alaïs in the year 1209 and Alice in 2005, with the two stories sharing a geography and intertwining.

A number one bestseller internationally, it sold millions of copies and was the bestselling title in the UK for 2006. It won the Richard and Judy Best Book at the British Book Awards 2006 and was named one of Waterstones’ Top 25 books of the past 25 years.

It was the second bestselling book in the UK in 2006, after The Da Vinci Code, with around 865,400 copies sold in paperback.

The television adaptation followed in 2013, directed by Christopher Smith and adapted by Adrian Hodges.

In October 2007 the second novel in the trilogy, Sepulchre, was published. A tale of haunting and Tarot set in fin-de-siècle and twentieth-century France, it was also a number one bestseller in the UK and an international bestseller.

The third, Citadel, completed the trilogy with a story set in the French Resistance during the Second World War. Across all three books, southern France, and Carcassonne in particular, works as far more than a backdrop. The history of the Languedoc, its Cathar heritage, its landscapes and its medieval secrets are embedded so deeply in the writing that the region itself becomes a presence in the narrative. Mosse has spent significant time in Carcassonne over the years, and it shows in the specificity of every detail.

Alongside the Languedoc books, Mosse developed a parallel strand of Gothic fiction.

These include her enthralling Gothic novel The Taxidermist’s Daughter, the haunting ghost story The Winter Ghosts and her short story collection The Mistletoe Bride and Other Haunting Tales.

These books share an atmosphere with the historical epics, an attention to place, to the past pressing through into the present, while working on a more intimate scale. The Winter Ghosts began as a novella for the Quick Reads initiative before being expanded into a full novel.

Her next major series, the Joubert Family Chronicles, began with The Burning Chambers in 2018.

The series includes The Burning Chambers, The City of Tears, The Ghost Ship and The Map of Bones, all of which reached number one on the bestseller lists.

The Chronicles follow a Huguenot family across centuries of conflict, exile and return, stretching from sixteenth-century France to the Dutch Golden Age and beyond. In their sweep and their fidelity to historical record, they represent the most ambitious work of Mosse’s career to date.

Her non-fiction includes her memoir about caring, An Extra Pair of Hands, and Warrior Queens and Quiet Revolutionaries: How Women (Also) Built the World.

Warrior Queens and Quiet Revolutionaries inspired her first one-woman theatre show.

The memoir is a direct and personal account of caring for elderly parents, written with the same precision she brings to historical research but trained on lived experience.

Beyond her own writing, Mosse has built something with a far longer reach.

In 1996 she co-founded the annual award for the best UK-published English-language novel by a woman that is now known as the Women’s Prize for Fiction, and since 2024 there has been a sister award, the Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction.

The prize was established to recognise the contributions of female writers who Mosse believed were often overlooked in other major literary awards.

Kate chaired the inaugural judging panel for the prize in 1996, and is now the Founder Director of both the Women’s Prize for Fiction and the Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction.

She considers her CBE as recognition of the importance of the Women’s Prize for Fiction, which she co-founded.

Locally, Kate hosts the pre-performance interview series at the Chichester Festival Theatre and is President of the Festival of Chichester. She is also a Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Chichester.

She is a Trustee of the British Library, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and an Honorary Fellow of the Society of Authors.

For ten years she was also a Trustee and Deputy Chair of the Board of the Royal National Theatre, and she is the only woman to have held that position.

Her next novel, Borderlands, will be published in summer 2027 with HarperCollins.

For the first time since Labyrinth twenty years ago, she is returning to a medieval and modern time-slip adventure thriller, set partly in Norman France at Le Mont Saint-Michel and partly in Sussex on the eve of the Norman Conquest.

Borderlands marks the thousandth anniversary of the birth of William the Conqueror.

Kate Mosse Books in Order

The Languedoc Trilogy

• Labyrinth (2005)
• Sepulchre (2007)
• Citadel (2012)

The Joubert Family Chronicles

• The Burning Chambers (2018)
• The City of Tears (2021)
• The Ghost Ship (2023)
• The Map of Bones (2024)

Gothic Fiction and Short Stories

• The Winter Ghosts (2009)
• The Mistletoe Bride and Other Haunting Tales (2013)
• The Taxidermist’s Daughter (2014)
• The Black Mountain (2022, Quick Reads)

Earlier Novels

• Eskimo Kissing (1996)
• Crucifix Lane (1998)

Non-Fiction

• Becoming a Mother (1993)
• The House: Behind the Scenes at the Royal Opera House (1995)
• An Extra Pair of Hands (2021)
• Warrior Queens and Quiet Revolutionaries: How Women (Also) Built the World (2022)
• Feminist History for Every Day of the Year (2025)

Forthcoming

•  Borderlands (HarperCollins, summer 2027)