Writing Cleopatra

On his website, C.W. Gortner, author of The Tudor Secret (reviewed here), posts a guest post from the acclaimed historical novelist Colin Falconer, whose debut novel When We Were Gods, a dramatisation of the life of Cleopatra, has recently been made available on Kindle. Falconer reflects on the difficulties of being a historical novelist and the ways in which fact is stranger than fiction: -

"In revising and tightening the manuscript I was struck again by two things: first, what a fantastic story it is. If it wasn’t all true, it would be hard to believe: thirty years before Jesus, an eighteen year old princess tries to take over the world? Outrageous. Cleopatra was a woman with real cojones. She took on Roman military and political power at the apogee of its power. If she had succeeded – and she very nearly did – we can only speculate what the world would be like today... The real Cleopatra was a consummate political animal, with extraordinary ambition, a rare talent for what we would today call spin and the instincts of a street fighter."

For Colin Falconer's full article on the Kindle edition of When We Were Gods, click HERE.