Dr Christine Lehnen (she/her)

I research the historical novel, the representation of the past in the present, contemporary memory culture and literature as a political and social intervention. As a creative practitioner, I write memoirs, essays, and literary fiction. In my practice as author-academic, I focus on how to combine politics and fiction, intervene through fiction in the crucial debates of our time, and illuminate the shape of the new literature engagee of the twenty-first century. I am currently interested in the ways that we can creatively engage with archives, collections, landscapes and archaeological sites to mobilise the material record and correct for the blind spots and biases of a written historiography that has traditionally excluded marginalised groups.

Both creatively and critically, I am interested in vulnerability and how we tell the past in the present: Who do we remember? Who do we forget? How does an event become history, how does history become myth? And what do these myths do to us in the present? I am currently preparing three books on the subject: Envoys, a literary historical novel set in 1180 BCE, Remembering Women: Lessons from the First Millennium BCE, a memoir cum narrative non-fiction for broader audiences, as well as a monograph on the current state of the literary historical novel entitled The Historical Novel in the Twenty-First Century: Grievable Bodies and Marginalised Histories (Routledge, 2026).

Remembering Women will be published by Icon Books in 2025.

I used to write SFF, suspense fiction and television scripts. More recent publications include: