Victoria Whitworth


Victoria Whitworth is a British writer, archaeologist and art historian. Her published writings, which focus on Britain in the later first millennium AD, include novels, academic works and a memoir.

Biography

Victoria Whitworth studied English at St Anne's College, Oxford, before doing an MA and a D.Phil. in York. From 2012 to 2016 she was a lecturer at the Centre for Nordic Studies on the Orkney campus of the University of the Highlands and Islands. Her research has primarily focused on Pictish, Scottish and Anglo-Saxon stone sculpture. Whitworth has published three historical novels set in Viking Age England.
On 27 September 2020 a letter in support of J. K. Rowling for her stance on transgender issues was published in the Sunday Times to which Whitworth was one of 58 signatories.
In 2025, Whitworth suggested that since the Book of Kells contains elaborate display capital letters in a style similar to the sculptures at the Pictish monastery in Portmahomack in Northeast Scotland, it may derive from there, not from Iona.

Honours and distinctions

Whitworth is a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries and of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland.

Books

Fiction

The Bone Thief, The Traitors’ Pit, Daughter of the Wolf,

Non-fiction

Swimming with Seals, Dying and Death in Later Anglo-Saxon England,