Reading and writing have always been passionate pursuits for Linda Messenger. She read English Literature with French and Philosophy at Durham University, but on graduation, obtained a place at a London drama school and spent ten years pursuing an acting career. Following a move to Paris with a Frenchman in 2008, she returned to writing, alongside teaching English at French Grandes Écoles. Beginning with two screenplays, one original and one adaptation of Turgenev’s novel ‘Liza’, she then went on to write a detective novel set in Paris.
The idea for her first historical novel sprang from the discovery of a vestige of a private asylum founded in the eighteenth century. On learning that it had housed aristocrats hoping to escape the guillotine during the French Revolution, her curiosity was piqued. ‘The Cabinetmaker of Saint-Antoine’ was researched and written whilst she was living in its setting, now the 11th arrondissement of Paris.
She moved to Brittany with her Frenchman and their daughter in the summer of 2020, and has spent the past year researching the life of Anne de Bretagne, Duchess of Brittany and twice Queen of France, for a second historical novel.
