ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Sybil Blackwood
Historical fiction for the women history forgot.
SYBIL BLACKWOOD
Writing the women history left behind.
Sybil Blackwood writes historically grounded fiction centered on the women history too often reduced to footnotes or left out entirely. Her stories blend fierce female characters, political upheaval, slow-burning sapphic tension, and an unflinching approach to violence, desire, and the cost of survival.
A lifelong student of history, Sybil is drawn to the spaces where the historical record becomes quiet: the women whose names were never written down, whose motives were dismissed, and whose lives can only be reconstructed through fragments. Those silences are where her stories begin.
Her debut novel, The Woman Who Refused Rome, is the first book in The Book of Ash trilogy.
WHY I WRITE
The gaps in history are where the stories begin.
I have always been fascinated by the parts of history that feel unfinished the names that disappear, the women mentioned once and never again, the lives reduced to a marriage, a death, or someone else’s victory.
Those absences are impossible not to notice once you start looking for them.
I write because I want to imagine the lives that might have existed beyond the surviving record: women who were ambitious, angry, loyal, frightened, reckless, in love, and entirely capable of changing the world around them even when no one thought to write their names down.
History tells us what survived. Fiction gives us room to ask what was lost.
History without the soft edges.
WHAT TO EXPECT
Sybil Blackwood’s stories are historically grounded, emotionally intense, and written for readers who prefer the past without its roughest edges sanded away.
Expect fierce women, political conflict, slow-burning sapphic tension, graphic battle scenes, explicit intimacy, and characters forced to make difficult choices in worlds where survival is rarely clean.
These are not stories that look away from blood, desire, brutality, or consequence.
A little more about the woman behind the stories.
BEYOND THE PAGE
When she is not writing, Sybil is usually reading about some corner of history that sent her down a completely unnecessary research rabbit hole, collecting details that may or may not ever make it into a book, or arguing with the historical record over the women it chose not to remember.
She studied history and archaeology, drawn not only to reading about the past but to the physical traces people left behind - the objects they handled, the places they inhabited, and the evidence that survives when written records do not. That connection to the tangible past continues to shape the way she approaches historical fiction.
Away from the page, life is decidedly less dramatic. Sybil shares it with an endlessly supportive wife who was the one to push her toward writing in the first place, a family she loves, far too many dogs, stacks of books, and an ongoing weakness for LEGO sets. Apparently, when she is not reconstructing lost worlds on the page, she is perfectly happy reconstructing them one tiny plastic brick at a time.