Nadine Akkerman is an archival detective, biographer, cryptographer, editor and spymistress. An acclaimed literary historian, she is the award-winning author of Invisible Agents. Her latest book is the authoritative biography of the sometime Queen of Bohemia Elizabeth Stuart, daughter of James VI/I. If historians take one thing from this book, it is that Elizabeth Stuart should never be called ‘The Winter Queen’ again.

Nadine is also the editor of The Correspondence of Elizabeth Stuart (3 vols), and it has been said that the only person who has read more of Elizabeth’s letters than Nadine is Elizabeth herself.

A popular public speaker in the UK, Nadine has been a guest on Woman’s Hour, Histories of the Unexpected podcast and on the SkyArts series Treasures of the British Library (with Julia Donaldson) to name but a few.

Nadine is Professor in Early Modern Literature and Culture at Leiden University, the Netherlands, where she lives in a seventeenth-century canal house with her partner, novelist Pete Langman (when they’re not in the UK), and hopes to have a cat soon. They are co-authors of Spycraft: Tricks and Tools of the Dangerous Trade from Elizabeth I to the Restoration. Out June 2024!