Sharan Newman is a medieval historian and author. She took her Master’s degree in Medieval Literature at Michigan State University and then did her doctoral work at the University of California at Santa Barbara in Medieval Studies, specializing in twelfth-century France. She is a member of the Medieval Academy and the Medieval Association of the Pacific.

Rather than teach, Newman chose to use her education to write novels set in the Middle Ages, including three Arthurian fantasies and ten mysteries set in twelfth-century France, featuring Catherine LeVendeur a one-time student of Heloise at the Paraclete, her husband, Edgar, an Anglo-Scot and Solomon, a Jewish merchant of Paris. The books focus on the life of the bourgeoisie and minor nobility and also the uneasy relations between Christians and Jews at that time. They also incorporate events of the twelfth-century such as the Second Crusade and the rise of the Cathars.

For these books, Newman has done research at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris where she is a Grand Lecteur, the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique France Méridionale et Espagne at the University of Toulouse and the Institute for Jewish History at the University of Trier, as well as many departmental archives.

The Catherine Levendeur mysteries have been nominated for many awards. Sharan won the Macavity Award for best first mystery for “Death Comes As Epiphany” and the Herodotus Award for best historical mystery of 1998 for Cursed in the Blood. The most recent book in the series The Witch in the Well won the Bruce Alexander award for best Historical mystery of 2004.

Just for a change, she set her most recent mystery, The Shanghai Tunnel (Forge 2008) in Portland. Oregon in 1868.

Newman has written a non-fiction book, The Real History Behind the Da Vinci Code, Berkley 2005. It is in encyclopedia format and gives information on various topics mentioned in Dan Brown’s novel and has been translated worldwide. For this she appeared on radio and television programs internationally. She has also appeared on several documentaries about the book. Following on that she wrote the Real History Behind the Templars published by Berkley in September of 2007. It was while doing the research for this book that she noticed how important Queen Melisende was to the Kingdome of Jerusalem and how little had been written about her. She is currently working on a biography of Melisende, the first native-born queen and first female ruler of Crusader Jerusalem. This will be published in early 2014.

Her most recent non-fiction is The Real History of the End of the World, Berkley, 2010. She has kept abreast of the latest threats to our continued existence on her blog, Apocalypses and Other Thoughts, which can be reached through her website.