 and – over the past few years – filled with their extended family, too. They have lived here since 2007, and the house was specially renovated to accommodate the family – Kate's parents used to live here until her father, who had Parkinson's, died in 2011, and her mother three years later. Busy schedules During lockdown their two grown-up children, Martha and Felix, were also here. Current occupants are the two of them, an elderly dog, Greg's brother Benjamin and Granny Rosie, Greg's mother, who has lived with them for the past 25 years. She appears in the kitchen in her wheelchair, aged 91 and bright as a button, in time for her lunchtime gin and tonic. They appear very relaxed but their lives are hectic. As well as caring for Granny Rosie and writing, Kate speaks at events and literary festivals, tours bookshops, and is planning a one-woman theatre show next year based on her new book. Greg, who once worked as an interpreter, is a theatre director, playwright and teacher – he founded and runs the New Writing programme at the Criterion Theatre in London – and was also responsible for setting up a three-dimensional website MosseLabyrinth, based on Kate's bestselling book. About a third of Kate's life is taken up with the Women's Prize for fiction, which she co-founded. 'Greg has lived the Women's Prize since its inception, and our children have been born into it,' she says. It was initiated in response to the 1991 shortlist for the Booker Prize, which was composed entirely of men, and established five years later, funded by an anonymous donor who remains anonymous. It quickly became a celebrated prize – winners have included Zadie Smith, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Helen Dunmore – despite the fact that initially Kate came in for a lot of criticism. At the press conference announcing the prize at the){kind=link}
One is a bestselling author; the other is about to release his debut – but what are their lives really like?
It was because of the pandemic that Greg Mosse, husband of the bestselling author and playwright Kate, was finally able to write his first novel. His normal profession – playwright and theatre producer – had become entirely redundant in lockdown. Writing fiction had been on his mind, but he never had the time. But then suddenly he did.
The Coming Darkness is a thriller set in 2037, a compelling story about a French spy on the trail of global eco-terrorists who are trying to destabilise the controls protecting the human race from climate change. “Greg Mosse writes like John le Carre’s hip grandson,” says Lee Child, on the blurb. The book is absorbing and intricately plotted, and Greg is already halfway through its successor. “I wanted it to be set in the near future,” he says, “dealing with all the things we’re concerned about today but more so – when the problems have become more severe, more insistent, more urgent.”
While Greg was writing about a fictional future in his study upstairs, his wife was downstairs researching her non-fiction book about the past. Kate has written eight historical novels, including the multi-million selling Languedoc trilogy, but only recently dipped her hand into non-fiction. Unsettled by how women’s achievements are often omitted from history, in early 2021 she started a social-media campaign asking “Who should we remember? Name one woman from history that you’d like to celebrate or think should be better known.”
“It was the only time I have trended on Twitter for being myself rather than the other one,” she says wryly. Her new book, Warrior Queens & Quiet Revolutionaries: How Women (also) Built the World, looks at the achievements of 1,000 under-rated women, and is intertwined with her own family history – the life of her great-grandmother, Lily Watson, a celebrated novelist in her day who was completely overlooked by history.