Kentish Express Ashford & District - What's On
DEDICATED TO THE ARTS
The annual Tonbridge Arts Festival takes place this weekend, featuring live music, talks, drama and art events sure to appeal to all tastes
Bestselling author Kate Mosse will be making an appearance at this year’s Tonbridge Festival. She will be talking about Citadel, the final book in her blockbuster Languedoc trilogy, that has just released in paperback. In the first two novels, Labyrinth and Sepulchre, feisty female heroines lead the action, and Citadel continues that theme, following the fortunes of heroine Sandrine Vidal, a young resistance fighter in Carcassonne and her network of women accomplices, codenamed Citadelle. She becomes involved in the quest for an ancient codex containing secrets which could change the course of the war. But collaborators with ugly motives are also searching for the document. Interlinked with this tale is the story of a medieval monk smuggling a forbidden manuscript into the region to prevent its seizure by intolerant Christians. All three books are set around the city of Carcassonne, a region of France where she and husband Greg, a creative writing teacher, bought a house in 1989. “So much of my writing of the last 23 years has been inspired by falling in love with Carcassonne. My husband had lived for some time in Paris. My mother-in-law was retiring and had a little bit of money so we just pooled resources and it seemed a lovely thing to do because we were teachers and writers and having somewhere to go is a lovely way of having a holiday every year. The minute I arrived, the place felt like home.” The family spend less time there now because of work commitments, so it has become their holiday home. As part of her research for Citadel, Kate learned how to fire weapons from the Second World War, receiving lessons at a Ministry of Defence training range. “I was shown all the Second World War pistols and sub-machine guns, rifles, the lot. It was the first time I’d ever held a gun, let alone fired one. I was a dreadful shot.” The eldest of three daughters of a solicitor and teacher, Kate grew up in Chichester, West Sussex, and was penning stories and plays from an early age. An accomplished violinist and pianist, she won a place at music college, but realised she was never going to be good enough to be a soloist, so went to Oxford University to read English. After university, she worked as a secretary in a publishing company and was advised by an agent to write her own books. Success was slow, though, and she wrote several non- fiction and fiction books before she hit the big time with Labyrinth in 2005. Since then, her books have sold in their millions in 40 countries. Greg, who took her name when they married, reads her drafts before they are submitted. They never row about his editing, she says. “Because Greg is a writer and a teacher and an editor, it’s different, but when people ask for my advice I’d say never give it to somebody who loves you because you will hate them if they’re critical and won’t believe them if they’re nice.” She has never taken her success for granted and is still amazed at how well her books have sold. “It’s an extraordinary feeling. I’ve been published well, I’ve been lucky and I wrote the kind of book that readers wanted at the time they wanted it.