Linda Proud

Linda Proud (born 1949) is a British historical novelist, most recognized for The Botticelli Trilogy, a series set in late fifteenth-century Florence. Raised as an only child in Hertfordshire, she loved inventing stories as a girl and, at 14, discovered the historical fiction of Mary Renault, who became a major influence on her own writing. Proud started her professional life as a picture researcher in 1971, a job that sparked her interest in the Florentine painter Botticelli and the Renaissance philosopher Marsilio Ficino. During this period she first conceived the idea for her trilogy and began researching Renaissance Florence. When images became digitized, she left picture research to teach creative writing to American students at the University of Oxford and also worked as an editor for The Writers Workshop.

Her early published works were non-fiction books on culture, spirituality, and art. Her first fiction, Knights of the Grail (1995), retold the Arthurian legend for children. The first volume of her trilogy, A Tabernacle for the Sun (1997, 2005), was published by Allison & Busby and was long-listed for the Mann Booker Prize in 1997, also winning a Southern Arts bursary and a Hawthornden Castle Fellowship. In 2000, Proud and her husband founded Godstow Press, a publishing house dedicated to art and spirituality.

All her later historical fiction, including the remaining trilogy volumes—Pallas and the Centaur (2004, 2012) and The Rebirth of Venus (2008)—was released under this imprint. After completing the trilogy, she was encouraged to write about Cosimo de' Medici, resulting in the prequel A Gift for the Magus (2012), which won a second prize Indie B.R.A.G. Medallion and the Quagga Prize for Independent Literary Fiction, and was named an Editors' Choice book by the Historical Novel Society.

The entire trilogy took over thirty years to write, with Proud grounding her work closely in primary sources. Her writing has been compared to that of H. F. M. Prescott, Mary Renault, and Marguerite Yourcenar.

In recent years, Proud has lectured on Renaissance philosophy and contributed to History Today on the boundaries between historians and novelists. She has also written articles and reviews for Resurgence & Ecologist, leads regular writing workshops, and gives talks on writing and publishing. In September 2018, she moved away from the Renaissance with Chariot of the Soul, a novel set in Britain just before the Roman invasion. Proud lives in Oxfordshire with her husband. She studies Neoplatonism and practices Advaita Vedanta daily.