Ross Laidlaw

Ross Laidlaw is a Scottish author of historical fiction, political thrillers and espionage novels. Born in Aberdeen in 1931 and brought up in Edinburgh, he was educated at the University of Cambridge and later worked as a schoolmaster and archivist in Britain and Canada. His extensive travels and work in Kenya and southern Africa broadened the geographical and political interests reflected in his fiction. His first novel, The Lion Is Rampant, published in 1979, imagined a near-future political crisis involving Scottish nationalism and conflict with the British state.

Laidlaw’s historical novels range from early-modern Scotland to the final centuries of the Roman Empire. The Linton Porcupine follows an English agent sent to investigate a secret weapon in sixteenth-century Scotland, while Aphra Behn: Dispatch’d from Athole places the writer and spy Aphra Behn amid seventeenth-century political intrigue. His later novels Attila: The Scourge of God, Theoderic and Justinian: The Sleepless One form a loose sequence about the collapse of Roman authority in the West, the rise of Gothic kingdoms and the power of the Byzantine Empire. His work combines military conflict and political rivalry with close attention to rulers navigating periods of imperial transformation.