Author Robyn Young tells of her inspiration including sword-fighting and falconry

Robyn Young immersed herself in the medieval worlds of The Crusades and the Scottish Wars of Independence between Robert the Bruce and King Edward of England for her two bestselling trilogies of epic historical novels Brethren and Insurrection.

Now the Hove based author plunges into The Wars of the Roses in her newly published latest novel Sons of the Blood, the first in her new series called New World Rising.

Set in the dying days of The Wars of the Roses, the series of wars in the 1400s between the rival royal houses of Lancaster and York for the English throne, the novel follows Jack Wynter, the bastard son of a king’s man, who is sent to Spain with a secret document he is to keep under lock and key and protect with his life. The tale travels from Spain back to an England on the verge of revolution and a New World rising.

It’s another epic journey into history for someone who didn’t study history. “I did History GCSE at school but it was all about dates and wars and ended up like a series of maths equations,” said Robyn, who lives in Hove with her partner Lee Wilson, a web designer. “English was my thing, and my discovery of the power of storytelling came first through my grandfather.”

Robyn’s history epiphany came when she was 22, after a conversation in a pub about the Knights Templar, a Christian military order whose knights fought in the medieval religious wars the Crusades. “It was the oxymoron of the religious warrior that interested me,” said Robyn, 40. “I went to Waterstones and picked up a book about the Knights Templar and read it in an afternoon. It managed to convey to me the absolutely human stories behind this point in history and it was like a secret world had opened up to me that I had never understood before.

“It was the stories of the reasons people joined the Knights Templar - some because they believed in their religion, some with other heartbreaking or heroic reasons – that made it become quite real to me and also harrowing. I wanted to tell these human stories.”

Robyn grew up in the Midlands and a fishing village in Exeter before moving to Brighton after taking A levels at Exeter College where she “was amazed by Shakespeare, confounded by Chaucer and drank too much beer”.

She hitch-hiked to Brighton, ran a music festival, spent a summer at illegal raves all over Britain, remembers “fire-breathing on a café roof on Brighton seafront” and very little else, took out her piercings to work in a Brighton nightclub and, finally, decided she needed a career after being “worn down by late nights and low wages”.

It took 20 job applications until she landed a position in a Brighton building society offering investment advice to customers, her first grown-up job.

“My family and friends were shocked – I had a nametag and a suit, and maths was without doubt my least favourite thing in the entire world,” said Robyn. “Several months in, I started writing a novel. I wrote constantly, furiously, and after six months I had the first novel of a fantasy series. This creative outpouring – vomiting, it felt like – was due to the fact work was so uncreative. The corporate world wasn’t for me and in the end I left.”

She started a foundation course in creative writing at the University of Sussex and began writing Brethren, the first of the Crusades trilogy that continued with Crusade and Requiem.

“It was to be the biggest, most challenging undertaking of my life – seven years from the first idea to the first print run, researching as I went, having never studied history,” said Robyn, who went on complete a masters in creative writing, the arts and education with distinction and began to teach creative writing. “After 13 rejections, an agent signed me up the day before I graduated. Brethren was rejected on its first send-out and by this point I was seriously financially challenged, supported by my partner, family and friends.”

Robyn “took a deep breath”, quit her teaching job and rewrote the novel for the last time. “I knew that if it didn’t go, I would have to stop and head into teaching full-time.”

In the end, there was a heated auction between publishers for the Brethren trilogy, which was won by Hodder & Stoughton. Brethren went straight into the Sunday Times Top 10, remaining there for five weeks and becoming the bestselling hardback debut of 2006. Her second novel, Crusade, reached No 2 in the charts, followed by her third bestseller, Requiem, and the bestselling Insurrection trilogy.

Her books have been published in 22 countries in 19 languages and together have sold almost two million copies. A full-time writer, she jokes that “I live and write in Brighton: I sing in the shower, still write bad poetry, avoid maths and still drink too much beer”.

But, joking aside, behind her weighty epics that span continents and centuries is detailed hands-on research.

Not only has she taken lessons in sword fighting, falconry, gun firing and horse-riding in order to get a feel for the skills her characters must display, she has visited as many locations as she can.

“As a writer, I feel a certain sense of responsibility to the people I am writing about because some of them were real people,” explained Robyn. “So I visit places, I check Google maps for terrain, I look at photos, I research weapons and coinage, and I read other people’s experiences of the locations and events I want to write about. For example, scenes in The Crusades novels are set in Mecca, which I couldn’t visit during the Hajj, the annual pilgrimage by Muslims, as I’m not a Muslim.

“Instead, I contacted people who had been there. There are going to be certain similarities in their experiences: the same religious fervour, wearing quite similar clothing, suffering the same privations on the same journey, similar travelling companions. As a non-religious person, understanding the devoutly religious mindset was quite an alien headspace for me. But I always feel as a writer it is important to convey the sense of place, to create that 3D effect for the reader, like a film scene in their mind.

“There is a sense of excitement when I start writing a battle scene, and by the time you are in it, in the melee, as a character being stabbed, for example, then you really start to feel it. I want to get into the mud and the blood of battle, so that I can understand where my characters have come from, what they have walked through to get to where they are.

“War is a human condition – if you get your characters to go through that, you as a writer have to go through that, through your characters.”

It can be hard for Robyn to switch from her characters’ world back to the real world. Often writing for between 12 and 16 hours a day, particularly as a novel builds, she lives a hermit-like existence. “I get very much immersed,” said Robyn, “then it’s a real shock when I have to go to Sainsbury’s for food. I find choosing between different types of beans harder than writing about a battle.”

Robyn is planning for her New World Rising series to span far more than a trilogy, perhaps as many as eight or 10 novels, and enjoys finding inspiration in unexpected places. “I went on holiday to Hawaii in between novels and learnt that around 4,000 years ago the kings of Hawaii were surfing,” she laughed. “And only kings were allowed to surf. I thought, hmmm, there’s an idea...”

• Sons of the Blood: Book 1 New World Rising by Robyn Young is published on July 28 by Hodder & Stoughton, priced £16.99. For more details about Robyn Young, visit robynyoung.com.