Fiona Forsyth

Fiona Forsyth is a British classicist and author of historical fiction and mysteries set in ancient Rome. She studied Classics at the University of Oxford and taught the subject for twenty-five years, including at Manchester Grammar School. A family relocation to the Middle East gave her the opportunity to begin writing fiction based on the period that had long interested her. Her novels draw on her academic background to explore the political violence, social divisions and personal consequences of Rome’s transformation from Republic to Empire.

Forsyth’s Lucius Sestius trilogy—Rome’s End, Blood and Shadows and The Emperor’s Servant—follows a Roman lawyer through Julius Caesar’s dictatorship, the aftermath of his assassination and the establishment of Augustus’s rule. Her standalone novel The Third Daughter retells the same era through Junia Tertia, sister of Marcus Brutus and daughter of Servilia. Forsyth later created a historical mystery series featuring the exiled poet Ovid in the Black Sea town of Tomis, beginning with Poetic Justice and continuing with Death and the Poet and Written in Blood. Her fiction combines murder investigations and political intrigue with close attention to women, enslaved people and ordinary inhabitants of the Roman world.