Mosse, Kate 1961-

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Mosse, Kate 1961-

PERSONAL:

Born October 26, 1961; married Greg Mosse. Education: Oxford University, B.A. (honors), M.A.

ADDRESSES:

Home—West Sussex, England; Carcassonne, France.

CAREER:

Random House, publisher, 1985-91; Chichester Festival Theater, West Sussex, England, deputy director, 1998-2001; British Broadcasting Corp. (BBC), London, England, host of Readers' and Writers' Roadshow on BBC 4. Also book reviewer for The Culture Show, on BBC 2 and guest presenter for Saturday Review and Open Book, both on BBC Radio 4. Cofounder and honorary director, Orange Prize for Fiction and the Orange Award for New Writers. Judge for awards, including the Orange Prize for Fiction, 1996, the Orange Futures, 2000, Arts & Business Awards, 1999-2001, Aventis Science Book Award, 2002, Asham Short Story Award, 1998, and British Council International Young Publisher of the Year Awards, 2005. Director of Mosse Associates Ltd. (with husband, Greg Mosse); teacher of Creative Writing at West Dean College, England.

MEMBER:

Royal Society of Arts, Arts & Business (trustee), South West Sussex Arts Group.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Named European Woman of Achievement, 2000, for contributions to the arts; Best Book of the Year Award, British Book Awards, 2006, for Labyrinth.

WRITINGS:

Becoming a Mother (nonfiction), Virago (London, England), 1993.

The House: Inside the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden (nonfiction), BBC Books (London, England), 1995.

Eskimo Kissing (novel), Hodder & Stoughton (London, England), 1996.

Crucifix Lane (novel), Hodder & Stoughton (London, England), 1998.

Labyrinth, Putnam (New York, NY), 2006.

Contributor of short stories to anthologies and contributor to periodicals.

SIDELIGHTS:

Kate Mosse is the author of works of fiction and nonfiction. Her debut novel, Eskimo Kissing, is the story of a fraternal twin who searches for her origins, and in the process comes of age and falls in love. Labyrinth, her third novel, has been compared to Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, in that it contains multiple threads of history, theology, and adventure. The two main characters live in worlds centuries apart. Alice Tanner is a modern-day archaeologist working at a dig in the South of France. She finds two skeletons and a ring, which depicts a puzzling labyrinth with a cryptic inscription, that is soon stolen. Alais, who lives in the thirteenth century, is given a book by her father, one of three volumes that may reveal the secrets of the pre-Christian Grail.

Robert Charles Wilson, who reviewed the novel in the Toronto Globe and Mail, remarked: "Perhaps the best thing in Labyrinth is the recreation of medieval Languedoc." Wilson felt that "the setting has obviously been well and lovingly researched," and he described Mosse's writing as being "evocative without being overblown, buttressed with small, vivid, just-right observations…. This is a setting not just imagined, but inhabited. Mosse creates a world larger than the experiences of her characters, leaving the impression that if you turned left at the corner where her protagonist turned right, you might discover yet another story, equally compelling."