About the Author

Jane has been an archaeological illustrator and graphic designer, bartender, short-order cook, and lipstick saleslady. She studied art as a dewy maiden and still creates compulsively detailed drawings, photo collages, and gouache paintings in her idle moments.

About ten years ago (during a premature mid-life crisis, the first in an ongoing and apparently unending series) she started to write fiction. Her short stories garnered enough rejections from literary magazines to help her develop nearly impenetrable emotional scar tissue and an occasional uncontrollable urge to jab total strangers with pointy sticks.

But…idiotically dogged persistence eventually paid off and her stories started to be accepted for publication. Soon she was even winning writing awards, much to the amazement of her family and anyone who has ever met her. She won two Illinois Arts Council awards and at the 2000 Southwest Writers’ Conference in Albuquerque took a pair of first places for short fiction—one for Mainstream and another for Literary. The judge for the Literary category was Rob Spillman, editor of Tin House Magazine. Things were definitely looking up. In 2001 she was awarded Pikes Peak Writers First Place for Mainstream Fiction (for an unpublished contemporary novel); that prize was given to her by best-selling author Robert Crais. By the beginning of 2005 she’d been nominated three times for the Pushcart Prize.

Along the way, one of her short stories drew the attention of a literary agent who encouraged her to finish the historical novel she’d already begun. Finish it she did and sell it the agent did.

These days she’s working on Novel Two, also medieval, and hoping someone will want to read it. She is married to Welsh geologist Andy Lewis, co-founder of Great Orme Mines, a Bronze Age copper mine that is run as an educational site in North Wales. He is a wonderfully patient man and is always ready to go tromping off down lonely, muddy paths.

Portrait of Jane Guill (© P Fraterdeus 2004)