My ALLi author guest this episode is Sharon Hague, a lawyer and Egyptologist who writes speculative historical fiction about ancient Egypt. Growing up at sea and traveling the world shaped her imagination, leading her to blend history and fiction in her award-winning Ancient Egypt series. We’ll talk about how she balances fact and fiction.
Listen to the Inspirational Indie Author Interview: Sharon Hague
Inspirational Indie Author Interview: Sharon Hague. About the Author
Sharon Janet Hague is a British-New Zealand author of speculative fiction – primarily historical fiction. She is the author of Moses and Akhenaten: A Child’s Tale, The Tutankhamen Friendship, and The Queen Who Became King. The series has won several awards. In 2024, bestseller status was achieved in the USA with Moses and Akhenaten: A Child’s Tale, and The Queen Who Became Kingm which reached number one. Sharon is a lawyer who also holds a master’s degree in Egyptology from the University of Manchester, England. She has visited Egypt multiple times since childhood, and pens articles on ancient Egypt for various publications. Sharon currently lives in New Zealand with her family, and twin cats, who mysteriously involve themselves in her novels. You can find her on her website, and on Facebook.
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Read the Transcripts
Howard Lovy: My guest this episode is Sharon Hague, a lawyer and Egyptologist who writes speculative historical fiction about ancient Egypt.
Growing up at sea and traveling the world shaped her imagination, leading her to blend history and fiction in her award-winning Ancient Egypt series. We'll talk about how she balances fact and fiction.
I'll let Sharon Hague tell her story.
Sharon Hague: Hi, I'm Sharon Hague, and I'm the author of the Ancient Egypt series. I am qualified in Egyptology, although I am a lawyer by day, and I'm onto my fourth book in that series, Alexander the Pharaoh of Egypt.
It starts off, however, with a novel about Akhenaten, who has been described as the first monotheist in history, and goes then to the story of Tutankhamen, or rather the discovery of the tomb and its discoverers. The last book, or the most recent book published, has been the Queen who Became King, and it's a real story about a queen who rose to the top position in ancient Egypt, mainly because of necessity, there were no men who were able to rule. So, she took that position.
That one's doing quite well, especially in America. So, it's an interesting journey.
Howard Lovy: Speaking of interesting journeys. There are your books and then there's your real life, and you've probably heard this comparison before, but I'll do it again. It sounds like you're a real-life Indiana Jones.
So, let's take a look at where you grew up and how you grew up. I think you grew up practically at sea, right?
Sharon Hague: Yes, I was born in London, England. My father was a ship captain, my mother was a teacher, and I think I started traveling, according to my mother, at the age of six months.
I traveled with them. We also lived on land periodically. Up until the age of 11, I think, was the last time I was at sea.
We had a two-year stint between, for me it was between the age of nine and close to 11, and my brother was a bit younger than me, 18 months younger. So, I had a companion, so that was nice.
Howard Lovy: That must have been quite an experience growing up. How did that sort of shape your imagination when you were young?
Sharon Hague: I think it was crucial. My father would take us to various countries which my mother would turn into social studies and history. So, we would learn about the countries we were visiting.
My parents were very good at learning different languages. If we were going to Germany, everybody would be speaking German for a few weeks. If we were going to China, I think my father actually did speak both Mandarin and Cantonese. I don't have that facility, but it certainly shaped my imagination because we were always moving through different landscapes.
Once we got off the ship, we would be traveling and visiting people as well, and learning about their customs.
I think that was very important because I always have seen people as being on a level playing field, so to speak.
Howard Lovy: With that kind of childhood, I can imagine that you take people as they come.
Sharon Hague: Yeah, and I think that the sea is an important factor as well. We had a very close family because obviously you are on board, but there is that need to give each other space. I think that's the same for, the officers and the crew, people who actually do go to sea, they learn how to live in community, but they also learn how to give each other space.
One of the ways in which you do that is you go out on deck at various times, for us it was in the evening and just look at the sea, and it is an extraordinary feeling. You can see 360 degrees. It's like a desert, but it's just sea as far as the eye can see, and sunset time is a very powerful time, especially for a child.
After dinner we go out on the sea and then I would go back into the cabins and start to write or paint until it was time for bedtime. During the day, of course, we studied, and I think it was actually a very good education because there are no gaps between one hour and the next.
You're not running to class, you don't share a classroom with 30 other students or 20 other students, you have the focus of the teacher. I was fortunate that my mother was a trained teacher. In fact, I think she was New Zealand's youngest senior woman at one point.
She was one of the athletes who won the tennis cup, I think, every year I have absolutely no sporting ability and I certainly was never ducks of my school.
Howard Lovy: Now, you started writing at a very young age. You mentioned that at the end of the day you'd go write and paint.
What did you write about?
Sharon Hague: I wrote about ancient Egypt. I fell in love with ancient Egypt when I was nine. We would go to a library, the Singapore library and pick up books. My mother would go in and pick up a whole lot of books and bring them on board. Then we'd go around for four months, so she picked up a lot of them.
I've discovered a book, which is now a classic. It's called The Lost Queen of Egypt by Lucille Morrison, an American writer, and it's now back in publication. It's an old-fashioned book. I think she wrote it in 1936, and I think she only wrote four books, but everything about the book appealed to me.
Obviously, I was at that age where you do find a great book that you enjoy, and it sparked everything. Sparked my love of Egypt, my love of writing and art as well.
Howard Lovy: Now, your mother encouraged you to do something else though, to study law, which you eventually did. Was there any kind of tension there, or was she worried about you being able to find a career?
Sharon Hague: I think she was, but there was never any pressure. I remember her dragging me off to a law meeting. I was 12, just started high school. I was a little bit ahead because of my mother's teaching, and so I was grateful for that, but I was surprised.
It was seven o'clock at night and she was taking notes. I have a law background in my father's family. My grandfather was a lawyer. One of my cousins has a law firm. It was in the family, but it was my mother who took me along to that.
I found a diary of hers not so long ago where she was planning the years I would spend and how much it would cost and that kind of thing, but she never pressured me. I could paint and write as I always had done and do other things, but I think she always thought that would be a way of having a secure career, and I think she was right.
Howard Lovy: Yeah. Eventually you went on to get a master's degree in Egyptology, so you had the best of both worlds, but did you ever come to a point where you said, I have to choose between one or the other.
Sharon Hague: No. It can be challenging to juggle, but I think that everything has come in at the right time. For instance, the world of publishing has changed fairly recently and continues to change, and I think things are working out very well.
I don't think that publishing or being published years ago would've been a good idea.
Egyptology has grown as well, so the things I learned when I was a child have been debunked by science now.
I was very lucky. I learned under Joyce Tyldesley. She's got an OB now and she's up for an award. She's one of England's best teachers, not just an archaeologist and Egyptologist, but she would bring out the best in every student.
Howard Lovy: I didn't realize that Egyptology has changed. I thought, here's the old stuff and that's about it.
Sharon Hague: It has changed a great deal. Even Akhenaten, I've written about Akhenaten, I held it back for 20 years because there was a lot of controversy around it. I didn't want that; I didn't want to live with that. But there are so many theories about him, and we're up to a new theory as well. It's been interesting.
There's been a lot discovered in Egypt as well over the last few decades, and because of technology a lot has been discovered now. So, we're constantly changing our view.
A lot of people don't realize this, and that is that the entire time scale of ancient history is based on Egypt. All your ancient history in the Mediterranean, and even the Bible, biblical history, is rightly or wrongly based in our knowledge of ancient Egypt.
There are some things around that which I won't go into.
Howard Lovy: So, let's talk about how you blend the real history with speculative fiction in your books. Tell me about how you weave the two together.
Sharon Hague: I have a knowledge of literature. I've got a master's in English, and so it's not straight historical fiction. I know the history behind what I'm writing about, but I'm also a discovery writer, and I use the parameters of history to allow me to finish, basically.
But in some cases, a character will just come to mind, and I go with that, and it develops into a character which I use in the book, whether that person existed or not. That's quite a normal thing to do, I think, with fiction.
The good thing about historical fiction or speculative fiction is that it can actually bring in people who don't know anything about historical period, and younger people, and then they might go on to actually study the academic side of that character.
I'm reading something now on Cleopatra, which has been written by a historian, and I didn't want the blend of fiction and academia, so to speak. He's such a good writer that I'm really enjoying it. So, I think it's an excellent tool to teach people about history.
But the way I approach it is that I know the topic backwards and forwards for this time period.
We're learning more and more all the time, but for instance, The Queen Who Became King, there are a lot of theories about her grab for power. It's now being changed. The theory is that she was actually looking after her family, but the story is about her family and a friendship that she has with people from Crete as well. I've been to Crete, and I brought in something about that into the Egyptian framework, so that you learn about Crete, and you learn about Egypt, but it's also a lot of fun. It's a lot of fun to create a character that is completely yours as well.
Howard Lovy: Yeah. Although do you think your fellow Egyptologists would be horrified at some of the liberties you might take?
Sharon Hague: The people on my email list started off being Egyptologists who are being polite because I interviewed them.
I've got some interviews on my website of Egyptologists. They knew that I had studied, I've been on some YouTube videos and stuff like that, but I noticed that some of the more eminent ones decided to unsubscribe after a certain time. It is just that Egyptologists have a career as well, they're busy with what they have to do, and they don't read novels and they're not to know that you are writing from a literary viewpoint as well as a historical. A lot of them teach, they're writing their own articles, it's probably just not for them, which is fine.
Howard Lovy: Now, why did you decide to go indie, or did you try to get a traditional publisher?
Sharon Hague: I fell into the indie world quite by accident, and I did look for a publisher. I was accepted by a couple of publishers for Akhenaten, the Moses and Akhenaten story. I suppose it's because I'm a lawyer, I like to read contracts, I do read contracts naturally, and I was not satisfied with some of the clauses in the contracts. I felt that they were in favor of the publisher to the detriment of the author.
Even while Akhenaten was held back 20 years. So, things have progressed in 20 years, but even there, I just thought, this is not good. I'm very glad I went to Indie because you keep your IP, and that is going to be very important in this age of AI. It was important in the digital age, but it's going to be even more important, I think.
Howard Lovy: Yeah. That's a good segue into talking about AI a little bit because you mentioned it on your website that it presents opportunities for authors.
How do you see AI playing a role in the future in terms of storytelling?
Sharon Hague: I think that, at the moment, my ideas are in vehicles, books, and that the vehicles can change.
Obviously, there are audio and film vehicles, that people are familiar with, but I think that there are things coming up that we can imagine, but also things we can't. I think we have to be preparing for that in some fashion.
For instance, Joanna Penn was talking about Apple and {inaudible} being in talks, this was quite a while ago, and they envisage replacing all screens with glasses, and you would have something virtual. You could be tapping on a desk at Starbucks, but there would be no screen. It would just be these glasses that were producing a screen in front of you, but I think it goes further than that.
I think authors are already able to make trailers. They're going to make movies. I think they're going to be able to make characters the way they envisaged them, and I think that maybe we won't have a screen. Maybe it'll be a chip in the brain, something virtual, like Minority Report. I don't know. I don't think the brain idea is a very good idea, but you never know.
But I think that things are going change so much that we should just hold onto that IP.
Howard Lovy: Interesting you say that because you're very much old school in the way you gather information. You don't say, hey, ChatGPT, tell me about Ancient Egypt. You actually learned about it, you travel to these countries, and you do it the old-fashioned way. Do you think that's going the way of the dinosaur or do you think there's still a place for old fashioned research?
Sharon Hague: First of all, I don't think it's old fashioned. I think that things are coming around.
I've sometimes traveled by public transport, and I noticed recently, tweenies getting on the bus, opening a book and reading it, and I thought, oh, that's fine, and then I realized they were actually making a point of opening this book rather than looking at their phone.
Because I come from the age of books, I didn't think much about it, but I realized that all teenagers love to rebel, and I noticed that they were making a point. I've listened to conversations, quite by accident, of very young, 12, 13, 14-year-olds, one of whom I think had a teacher who was against social media, and they started coming off social media.
I've noticed that with lawyers. I've been to lawyer meetings with young people who've just, as they put, committed Facebook suicide, and just left social media.
I think that's a good thing, and the reason I think it's a good thing is because there is an overload on the brain, especially young brain, a still growing brain.
Get out there, have a look around. Use your internet for research, that's brilliant.
But when I was going into Egypt, looking for Akhenaten, because I did it as though I had never read a book about him, and I went to his city, which is sitting in the middle of Egypt. The Greeks called it the City of Moses, oddly enough, and we were standing on this escarpment.
There were only four of us, and there was nobody else there. It was boiling hot. It was something like 50 degrees or something like that. It was just like a white out, and one of my friends was saying, would you please hurry up and figure out if he's Moses or not? We're dying here.
I just thought, I don't know, I really don't know. But one thing I do know is I think he was running away and, of course, a lot of the Egyptologists say that he was leaving his city, he was running away because of the persecution.
You can sit there and debate, is he Moses or not? I personally don't think he is, but that's after a lot of thinking and a lot of going around and I could change that as well. There are Muslims who think that he's Moses and of course, Sigmund Freud, Jewish, who loved Moses, and he loved Akhenaten, and he didn't put the two together.
Howard Lovy: It's good to hear that, that you see other kids or young people doing this. I've noticed that too. I have a son in college who's a film major, and he is very much against anything digital right now. He goes out and shoots super eight, like we did in the seventies. He listens to vinyl, not just vinyl, but they actually listen to cassette tapes now, just like I did when I was a kid. They like the feel of something physical, even though it's not perfect. It's like wonderfully flawed. It's analogue instead of digital. So, that's a good trend.
Sharon Hague: I think it's ownership as well.
I saw Rockstar, when you got Sergeant Peppers' Lonely Hearts Band vinyl piece, it was like a present. You opened it up and you saw the fantastic designs on the cover, and you own that. It's not like a piece of space on your phone. It's a different sense of ownership, which you get in a book as well.
A child gets a book, and they open it up, and I think that's why these Kickstarters with these amazing products are really taking off.
Howard Lovy: Yeah, my son, by the way, is horrified if I listen to an album on shuffle, you're supposed to listen to it from beginning to end with each track in order.
So, we're digressing a little bit, but I see your point.
Let's talk about what you're doing now. You're upcoming book is about Alexander. So, give us a sneak peek into what that's about and any other projects you're working on.
Sharon Hague: Sure. I started Alexander a long time ago. Again, he was somebody I wanted to write about in childhood, and I was writing the first drafts around about the time that the Oliver Stone movie came out. I was very worried that the Oliver Stone movie would be anything like what I was writing about.
I shelved it partly because I was writing about his whole life and it was difficult, and then I picked it up about two, three years ago and it was a delight. It was a delight to write that first draft.
It's about his life from childhood to becoming Pharaoh of Egypt, and when he becomes Pharaoh of Egypt, he goes to the oasis where the oracle tells him that he is the son of Zeus, which is the son of God really, and he goes off to conquer the world.
He's about 24 when you leave him, and it's about all the children he grows up with.
He goes from being, I think the editor was saying, that he goes from being a lovely little child to making quite a few mistakes, but I don't think you lose any empathy with him.
In any case, the main character is actually his opposition. Cassander comes into history in the time of Babylon. Cassander actually is responsible for killing, this is in real life, killing Alexander's family and he's often, credited is not quite the right word, with Alexander's demise.
If in fact Alexander was killed, we don't know. There were many theories. But the finger points to Cassander. There's a lot of humor in the book, and I've made Cassander a person who starts off being a self-obsessed little boy, as the editor pointed out, and then he becomes the best character.
He's the character who's saving women and children in the war. That he doesn't hold with this narcissistic idea of ruling the world. He is the conscience of the book, and the battle scenes are all there, but they're not overly gory in detail, and I think it concentrates on the characters themselves, their interpersonal relations.
I think that gives an overview.
Howard Lovy: Are your books mostly character driven rather than plot driven?
Sharon Hague: The plot is the actual historical events, and I think that helps. I remember when I was a child playing with my brother and I would be interested in the toys we were playing with and the characters and keeping them safe, and my brother was interested in wrecking everything and the technology behind things.
I think that when a woman is writing, it's a generalization, but Alexander to a woman, I think is necessarily different than Alexander to a man.
Having said that, there is a series on Netflix, which is written and produced by a woman.
I personally have just kept away from a lot of the gore and stuff like that.
I think that you can bring in people better if you have the relationship going on between the characters.
I think it's something men are interested in as well. They're interested in the camaraderie between these men.
So, I think it's a book that both men and women can read. There's a lot of action there, and there's also the characters there. I don't think you can have just the battles on their own, and I almost think that might have been an issue with Oliver Stone's film.
Howard Lovy: Frankly, to me, and maybe I'm not the typical male, but battle scenes really bore me, and I like to know who these people were.
You're an Egyptologist, so you probably have a better handle on what they might have been like in real life than most people.
This has been fascinating, Sharon. I appreciate you taking the time to give us your insight about writing about analogue versus digital and ancient Egypt.
This has been fascinating, and thank you for appearing on the show.
Sharon Hague: My pleasure. Thank you, Howard.
Howard Lovy: Thank you. Bye.
