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Elodie Lauren Geraldine Harper is an English author and journalist. She began her career working for the BBC and Channel 4 News before joining ITV News Anglia as a reporter. Her Pompeii-set novel The Wolf Den (2021), the first in a trilogy, became a #1 Sunday Times bestseller.
Harper successfully submitted her short story "Wild Swimming" to Stephen King's Bazaar of Bad Dreams short story competition. The winning story then featured King's 2016 anthology Six Scary Stories. That March, Harper signed a two-book deal with Mulholland Books for the publication of her debut novel The Binding Song, a thriller set at the fictional HMP Halvergate in Norfolk, in 2017. This was followed by her second crime novel The Death Knock in 2018. However, she felt her first two novels, set in the "Norfolk Noir" genre, were too close to her day job, motivating her to go into historical fiction.
Historian Dan Jones introduced Harper to Head of Zeus (a Bloomsbury Books imprint), through which Harper published her first historical fiction novel The Wolf Den in May 2021. Set in ancient Pompeii, the novel follows Amara, a young woman enslaved in the city's Lupanar. She cited Robert Knapp's Invisible Romans, Mary Beard's Pompeii, and Alison Cooley's Pompeii and Herculaneum as some of her sources when conducting research for the novel. The Wolf's Den debuted at #1 on The Sunday Times paperback fiction list, won the Goldsboro Books Glass Bell Award, and was shortlisted for Page Turner of the Year at the 2022 British Book Awards. It was also longlisted for the Historical Writers' Association's (HWA) Gold Crown Award. This was followed by a sequel The House with the Golden Door in 2022, which entered the top 10 on the bestseller list. The third and final installment The Temple of Fortuna was published in 2023. Antonia Senior of The Times called it "one of the best historical fiction trilogies" since Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall.
In 2022, it was confirmed Harper would reunite with Head of Zeus for her next two novels: Boudicca's Daughter and an untitled novel about Fulvia, Mark Antony's wife. In 2024, Harper signed her first children's book deal with DK Children for a middle-grade trilogy.
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