About Jessie

Jessie Childs is an award-winning author, historian and broadcaster. Her first book Henry VIII’s Last Victim won the Elizabeth Longford Prize for Historical Biography, and her second, God’s Traitors, won the PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize for History in 2015. It was also longlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction and selected as a Book of the Year in the Times, Sunday Times, Daily Telegraph, Observer and BBC History Magazine.

Jessie’s latest book The Siege of Loyalty House tells the story of the heroic resistance of a royalist mansion in the English Civil War. It will be published by The Bodley Head on 19 May 2022 and has been hailed by Simon Schama as ‘extraordinary, thrilling, immersive… at times almost Tolstoyan in its emotional intelligence and literary power’.

Described by Hilary Mantel as ‘a brilliant speaker as well as writer’, Jessie has performed at major national and international literary festivals and frequently appears on television and radio. TV credits include the RTS Award-winning and BAFTA-nominated Elizabeth I’s Secret Agents (BBC 2 & PBS), and BBC Four’s two recent series on Charles I: Downfall of a King and Killing a King.

She has written and reviewed for many publications, including The Times, Sunday Times, Guardian, Telegraph, Financial Times, Literary Review, TLS and LRB. She was one of the judges of the 2016 PEN Hessell-Tiltman History Prize and the 2021 HWA Non-Fiction Crown.

She is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and lives with her husband and two daughters in Hammersmith.