Kate Mosse

Kate Mosse is a British novelist whose Labyrinth — a dual-timeline mystery involving the Holy Grail, medieval Catharism, and the present-day south of France — became an international bestseller and launched one of the most popular historical mystery series of the 2000s.

Kate Mosse co-founded the Women’s Prize for Fiction (then the Orange Prize) in 1996 as a response to the all-male Booker Prize shortlist the previous year, and has been its honorary director since its inception. Her fiction career runs alongside this organizational work.

Labyrinth (2005) is her most widely read novel: a dual-timeline narrative alternating between thirteenth-century Languedoc, at the time of the Albigensian Crusade against the Cathar heresy, and the present day, where an archaeologist discovers a medieval connection to a religious mystery. The novel draws on the same territory as The Da Vinci Code — hidden sacred knowledge, secret religious societies, medieval France — but approaches it with more historical rigor. Mosse spent years researching medieval Catharism and the specific landscape of the Languedoc, and the historical sections reflect this.

Sepulchre (2007) and Citadel (2012) complete the Languedoc trilogy, set in the same landscape but different historical periods. The Winter Ghosts (2009) and her more recent gothic fiction represent a parallel strand of her work. Mosse’s books are primarily read for their atmosphere — the sense of medieval history pressing through into the present — and for their narrative drive. They are not literary fiction in the usual sense, but they are more rigorously researched than most popular historical fiction, and the Languedoc trilogy in particular benefits from her evident love for the specific landscape it inhabits.