Christine Lehnen

Writer, Critic, Academic
Writing on, thinking about, and telling stories of how
the past shapes our present and the future

»What we remember matters. We turn to the past to conceive of who we are – and, more importantly, who we think we should be.«

Imagine Scythia’s fierce warrior women, Aeon, 2022

public
writing

In her research, fiction and public writing, Christine spotlights how the past shapes what we think of as normal in the present and what we can envision for our future.

Christine regularly communicates cutting-edge humanities research to the public. She contributes on history, archaeology, literature, feminism and culture to DW.com and has written for Aeon, Psyche, Antigone, The Wire India, New Lines Magazine and Cultural Practice Magazine. Christine is the proud founder of the public research magazine 42 .

Young women were the true originators of the Grimms’ Tales

Psyche

Herodotus, Pirate Amazons, and How to Write about the Past

Antigone Journal

Commemorating Amazon Women Warriors in Turkey Brings Past to Life

New Lines Magazine

New book!

Icon Books will be publishing Remembering Women – Memories from the First Millennium BCE in 2025. It takes a hopeful look at gender equality in the past, present, and future. Meet the diplomats, warrior women, and heroines of the Bronze Age! Women do have a history of their own. All we need to do is remember it.

Learn more

research

Christine lectures in critical and creative writing at the University of Exeter. She is an expert on practice-based research, gender equality, Western memory cultures, grievability, and the contemporary historical novel.

Her research has been published in Alluvium, Nomos and the Journal of Literary Theory. She will be contributing to a collection on audiovisual representations of ancient Amazons in contemporary media on submission with Bloomsbury Academic (2025) and a collection on feminist reparative history published in Brill’s Global Historical Fictions series.

Board member of the Historical Fictions Research Network and member of the Memory Studies Association. Member of the editorial board of The Journal of Historical Fictions.

novels

Christine’s novels are published by Penguin Random House and Harper Collins.

Her fantasy fiction has been awarded the Lovelybooks Reader Award (Das Lied der Nacht) and nominated for the RPG Fantasy Award (Palace of Glass).

She is a Lecturer in English and Creative Writing at the University of Exeter. She was the founder and director of the Novel Writing Workshop at the University of Bonn which has seen numerous students go on to receive agency representation and close book deals with both major and independent publishers. She read English and Politics at the University of Bonn and the Nouvelle Sorbonne (Paris III) and completed her doctoral degree at the University of Manchester.

Christine Lehnen is represented by Thérèse Coen at Susanna Lea Associates in London.

Palace of Glass – Die Wächterin von C E Bernard

events

Christine will be delivering a community outreach workshop in her hometown of Recklinghausen on April 22nd, 2024, for World Book Day.

fun

In her spare time, Christine is most likely to be found on a train to London, a plane to Paris, in the theatre, at the movies, or in a museum. She is currently obsessed with the fabulous Empire podcast hosted by Anita Anand and William Dalrymple.

She is a lover of the cinema, the theatre, and a seasoned traveller. Her current literary obsessions is Alba de Céspedes. The last excellent book she read was Julia Jackson’s gripping account of the Pétain trial in post-war France.

Born in the Ruhr Valley in Western Germany, she has since lived in the United States, Australia, Canada and France, and is now based in the UK.