[3] Her fiction works have earned a nomination for the Sunday Times Young British Writer of the Year Award (The Quetzal Summer, 1993)[4] and her trilogy of historical novels The Aviary Gate (2008), The Pindar Diamond (2011) and The House at Bishopsgate (2016) have been translated into 20 languages.
[6] Hickman was born into a diplomatic family in 1960 and spent the first twenty-five years of her life living abroad in Spain, Ireland, Singapore and South America.
[7] The influence of travel on her life and being the daughter of a diplomatic spouse played a big part in her choice of subject matter as a writer.
Finding inspiration in a culture largely untouched by the trappings of the 20th Century, she became one of the first white women ever to travel to the furthest eastern regions of Bhutan.
[20] Five years later Hickman produced her second novel: The Aviary Gate[21] (2008), the first in a trilogy set in the early seventeenth century Constantinople, Venice, London, and rural Wiltshire which became a bestseller in Italy, selling more than 50,000 copies in hardback alone.