2020 CIBA Geoffrey Chaucer Award for Best Historical Fiction before 1750--Bird in a Snare;
2020 Next Generation Indie Awards finalist, Best series--The Lord Hani Mysteries
N.L. Holmes is an award-winning novelist embarking on another significant career phase. Prior to taking up the power of writing and using this pen name, she was an accomplished archaeologist and teacher for 25 years. Early in her career, she served as a nun for two decades. In between, she was an artist and antiques dealer. Yes, she has lived an interesting life and the sum of her experiences informs and inspires her writings today.
Born and raised in Fort Worth, Texas, she attended The University of Texas in the honors program but dropped out midway to enter into the antiques business. Two years later, she entered the Discalced Carmelite convent in Texas. She left the convent 20 years later and returned to school to get her B.A. in Classical Studies.
Holmes, who earned her doctorate in Classical and Near Eastern Archaeology from Bryn Mawr College despite an offer to attend Princeton, has excavated in Greece and Israel, and also did archaeological artwork for excavations from Lebanon. She taught ancient history and humanities at Stockton University in New Jersey and the University of South Florida for many years.
Her ten published novels embrace two series of historical fiction: the Lord Hani Mysteries, set in the Egypt of Akhenaten, and the Empire at Twilight series, featuring life in the Hittite Empire in the 13th century BCE. The inspiration for her Bronze Age novels came with an assignment she gave to her students one day: Here are the only documents we have telling us about royal divorce in Ugarit in the 13th century. How much can we say about what happened? She notes: “It quickly became apparent that almost anything we might come up with was as much fiction as historiography!”
Holmes resides with her husband and three cats. She splits her time between Tampa, Florida, and northern France, where she gardens, weaves and plays the violin. She also has an adult son.