Naomi Kelsey

Naomi Kelsey is an award-winning author of historical fiction whose work focuses on women navigating political, religious and social danger in the early modern period. She has received two Northern Writers’ Awards and won the Historical Writers’ Association Dorothy Dunnett Competition in 2021. Her fiction has appeared in Mslexia and has also been shortlisted for the Bridport Prize and the Bristol Prize.

Kelsey’s debut novel, The Burnings, is set during the North Berwick witch trials of 1589 and follows a Scottish servant and a Danish courtier drawn together by the marriage of James VI of Scotland and Anna of Denmark. Her second historical novel, The Darkening Globe, moves to Elizabethan London in 1597, where a mysterious globe brought home from the Americas becomes connected to secrecy, family conflict and unexplained deaths. Her fiction combines Gothic atmosphere and psychological suspense with themes of gender, power, persecution and the recovery of women obscured by conventional historical narratives.