Jessica P asked Sharon Kay Penman:

I can pinpoint the exact moment I knew I would spend my life researching, writing about, and teaching American history (I walked in on my parents walking Gettysburg on a rainy day over summer vacation). Do you have a moment as vivid as this for when you fell in love with Medieval history? What was it that caused such a passion?

Sharon Kay Penman That is such a vivid image, Jessica; I can almost see the three of you trudging the battlefield, knowing it is haunted by ghosts. Battlefields always seem so deceptively peaceful, as if wanting to deny that hundreds or thousands of men met a bloody death on those green fields.
I did not have the same sort of epiphany that you did. With me, it was more gradual. I always loved history and I always wanted to write, although I never expected to be able to make a living doing so. My love of medieval history came about by accident, really. I stumbled onto the story of Richard III, and the more I read, the more indignant I became on Richard's behalf. I soon discovered that my friends were not keen to listen to me rant on about the terrible injustice done this long-dead English king, so I decided that I would write about it. I never expected it would take me 12 years, of course. And by the time Sunne was finally published, I was so firmly rooted in the MA that it never occurred to me to write about another era. I subsequently toyed with the idea of doing a novel about the American Revolution and one set in the waning days of the Roman Republic, but reluctantly realized that I'd need a cat's proverbial nine lives for the research alone.

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