About Me

Steven Veerapen was born in Glasgow and raised in Paisley. Pursuing an interest in the sixteenth century, he was awarded a first-class Honours degree in English, focussing his dissertation on early modern representations of Henry VIII’s six wives. He then received a Masters in Renaissance studies, which looked at Renaissance-era visual and literary representations of the later Tudors, and a Ph.D. investigating Elizabethan slander.

Following his Ph.D., he began working on the Simon Danforth trilogy of murder mysteries set in Scotland during the 1540s, in addition to writing an historical fiction about the life and death of Henry, Lord Darnley. Afterwards, he turned to popular nonfiction, writing studies of the relationships between Mary Queen of Scots and her brother, Moray, and Elizabeth I and the Earl of Essex. He is currently working on the Jack and Amy Cole series of Elizabethan spy novels. When not writing, he teaches English Literature at the University of Strathclyde.

Steven is fascinated by the glamour and ghastliness of life in the 1500s, and has a penchant for myths, mysteries and murders in an age in which the law was as slippery as those who defied it.