Helen Castor author page

Helen Castor biography

Helen Castor is a medieval and Tudor historian. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a Fellow Commoner of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. She has presented radio and television programmes for the BBC and Channel 4, including documentaries based on She-Wolves and Joan of Arc.

Her first book, Blood & Roses, is a biography of the fifteenth-century Paston family. Blood & Roses was longlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize in 2005 and won the English Association’s Beatrice White Prize in 2006.

Her history books include She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth and Joan of Arc. She-Wolves was adapted into a BBC2 television series.

She wrote Elizabeth I for the Penguin Monarchs series, a short study of Elizabeth’s reign and the insecurity that shaped the queen’s political life. Her later book The Eagle and the Hart tells the connected story of Richard II and Henry IV.

The Eagle and the Hart: The Tragedy of Richard II and Henry IV was reviewed in November 2024 as a nonfiction dual biography of the two English kings.