The author
About Celeste Anchor
The author
Celeste Anchor
Celeste Anchor is the pen name of a writer who finds the gaps in the historical record more interesting than what made it in. She reads primary sources for fun, has strong opinions about who gets to be called a pirate versus a privateer, and is constitutionally incapable of writing a bland sentence about a woman who commanded a fleet.
Her debut novel, Queen of Salt & Iron, centers Grace O’Malley and arrives 15 June 2027. When she isn’t in the archive, she’s on the water, working on her boat. Her newsletter is Ink & Anchor.
The work is
- Rigorously researched historical fiction
- Told through women whose names rarely survived the archive
- Set on the Atlantic coast of sixteenth-century Ireland
- Interested in power, and in what the record deliberately omitted
- Paced for readers who want to think while they read
- Written for adult readers
The work is not
- A romance series
- Present-day or near-future fiction
- Action-adventure plots centred on male protagonists
- A children’s or young adult series
- Broadly commercial women’s fiction