Amy Jeffs is a British art historian and author, based in Somerset, who has become one of the most distinctive voices retelling the myths and medieval history of Britain.
A medievalist by training - with a doctorate in art history from Cambridge, a master's from the Courtauld, and time spent among the manuscripts of the British Library - she is also an accomplished printmaker, and illustrates her own books with her own linocuts and wood engravings.
Her debut, Storyland: A New Mythology of Britain, retells the island's origin legends from giants and floods to the founding of its kingdoms, woven together with a historian's commentary and her striking prints; a Sunday Times bestseller, it was shortlisted for the Waterstones Book of the Year. She followed it with Wild: Tales from Early Medieval Britain, gathering stories of outcasts, monsters and the natural world, and with Saints, a new legendary of medieval holy lives, before turning to traditional ballads in Old Songs.
Bringing the scholarship of a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries together with the eye and hand of an artist, she writes history that reads like myth, and myth grounded in real history.
