Philippa Gregory

Philippa Gregory is a British historical novelist who has done more than perhaps any other contemporary author to popularize Tudor and Plantagenet-era women's stories for a mainstream audience. She is best known for The Other Boleyn Girl, a fictionalized account of Mary and Anne Boleyn's rivalry for Henry VIII's attention, which became a bestseller and was adapted into both a BBC television film and a 2008 Hollywood feature starring Natalie Portman and Scarlett Johansson. That book anchors her wider Plantagenet and Tudor sequence, which includes The White Queen, The Red Queen, and The White Princess, adapted by the BBC and Starz as the television series The White Queen and The White Princess.

Gregory holds a PhD in eighteenth-century literature and brings genuine historical research to novels that nonetheless read as accessible popular fiction, typically told from the point of view of women who are marginal or silenced in the traditional historical record. Beyond the Tudor court novels, she has written the Wideacre trilogy, the Order of Darkness young-adult series, and nonfiction on women's history. A reader new to her work might start with The Other Boleyn Girl for the most famous entry point, or The White Queen to begin the Plantagenet sequence in rough chronological order. She continues to publish and remains active in historical fiction and public history commentary.