Cecelia Holland

Cecelia Holland (born 1943) is an American novelist known primarily for meticulously researched historical fiction spanning many eras and cultures, from the Mongol conquests to medieval Byzantium and the Viking age. She began writing as a child and became a full-time professional writer with her debut novel, The Firedrake, published in 1966; she received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1981–82 and later taught creative writing to inmates at Pelican Bay State Prison for a decade. Her work is noted for character-driven plots, colloquial dialogue across historical settings, and battle scenes told from the perspective of ordinary soldiers rather than commanders. Outside her historical novels, Holland wrote the science fiction novel Floating Worlds (1976), an epic of political intrigue across a colonized solar system in the far future, and the fantasy Soul Thief sequence. She has published more than twenty novels over her career.