About Joanne R. Larner
Joanne R Larner was born in London and moved to Rayleigh in Essex (UK) in 2001. She had wanted to write a novel since the age of thirteen and finally managed it in 2015, inspired by Richard III. She became fascinated by him when she saw the Channel 4 documentary ‘The King in the Car Park’ in February 2013. She researched his life and times and read countless novels, but became fed up because they all ended the same way – with his death at the Battle of Bosworth. So she decided to write a different type of Richard story and added a time travel element. The rest is (literally) history. Then came two sequels, making ‘Richard Liveth Yet’ a trilogy – a kind of ‘Back to the Future’ with Richard III.
She found that other Ricardian authors were equally fascinated by the ‘What if this had happened instead…?’ question and then she read an anthology of stories about 1066 (‘1066 Upside Down’) and was inspired by that to do a similar treatment of the Wars of the Roses. She recruited twenty other authors who all felt the same. The result was ‘The Road Not Travelled’, a mix of stories and styles with one thing in common – they all imagine a fictional alternative scenario of events which made history during the period known as the Wars of the Roses.
