Life
Jane Johnson is from Cornwall and has worked in the book industry for 20 years, as a bookseller, publisher and writer, and is the author of THE TENTH GIFT, THE SALT ROAD and THE SULTAN’S WIFE.
She was responsible for publishing the works of JRR Tolkien during the 1980s and 1990s and worked on Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movie trilogy, spending many months in New Zealand with cast and crew. Under the pseudonym of Jude Fisher she wrote three bestselling Visual Companions to the films. With The Hobbit movies coming in December 2012 and 2013, she’s visited Jackson’s movie production again to prepare two new Visual Companions. She has also written several books for children, including THE SECRET COUNTRY, MASKMAKER and GOLDSEEKERS.
In 2005 she was in Morocco researching the story of a distant family member who was abducted from a Cornish church in 1625 by Barbary pirates and sold into slavery in North Africa (which formed the basis for Crossed Bones/The Tenth Gift), when a near-fatal climbing incident caused her to rethink her future.
She returned home, gave up her office job in London, sold her flat and shipped the contents to Morocco. In October she married her own ‘Berber pirate’ and now they split their time between Cornwall and a village in the Anti-Atlas Mountains.
She still works, remotely, as Fiction Publishing Director for HarperCollins. THE SULTAN’S WIFE is set in Morocco and England in the 17th century and is the story of a eunuch at the court of Sultan Moulay Ismail who is sent on the 1682 embassy to the court of King Charles II which is documented in John Evelyn’s famous Diary.