G. J. Williams

G. J. Williams is a Welsh historical novelist and psychologist whose fiction combines Tudor history, murder mystery and political intrigue. Raised in England in a Welsh-speaking family, she grew up in Somerset and later earned a PhD in psychology. She spent around twenty-five years working as a business psychologist, developing executives and teams in the legal and financial sectors, before concentrating on fiction. Williams has described C. J. Sansom’s Dissolution as an important influence on her interest in historical crime. Her psychological background is evident in her interest in motives, deception and the darker aspects of human behaviour, while her novels are carefully fitted around documented Tudor events and real historical personalities.

Williams is best known for the Tudor Rose Murders, featuring the real scholar, astrologer and sometime intelligence agent John Dee alongside his fictional apprentice Margaretta Morgan. The Conjuror’s Apprentice is set under Mary I in 1555 and involves a conspiracy threatening Princess Elizabeth; The Wolf’s Shadow moves to 1558 and the final months of Mary’s reign; The Cygnet Prince takes place in 1561, when a German prince claims to be the secret son of Henry VIII and Anne of Cleves; and The Assassin’s Mark is set in 1570 in the aftermath of the Northern Rebellion, with Elizabeth I threatened by another conspiracy. Williams is also beginning a more overtly historical-fantasy sequence with The Nun’s Kiss, the first Gawain novel, in which the Arthurian knight has survived for centuries under a curse and becomes involved in a murder at a medieval priory. Its UK publication is scheduled for 13 August 2026.