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Hey friend, welcome back to the Renaissance English History podcast.

You are about to listen to or watch an interview with

Joe Harkin, author of the forthcoming book The Pretender about Lambert Simnel. One of the perks

of being a patron or YouTube member is that there are monthly author chats with fabulous authors like Joe Harkin. So if you would

like to attend these chats live when I have them, just become a patron at patreon.com slash

Englandcast. Patreon.com slash Englandcast. Or if you're watching this on YouTube, just go ahead and

click join this channel to see all of the perks. All right, let's get

into it. Joe Harkin is the author, like I said, of the forthcoming book The Pretender about Lambert

Semmel. She is fabulous. The book is amazing. I highly recommend it. Her passion is literary sci-fi with

an emphasis on how new technology impacts human lives. Her inspirations include

Kizu Oshiguro, Jennifer Egan, Charlie Kaufman, and Margaret Atwood. Her first speculative fiction

novel, Tell Me an Ending, was released in March of 2022. She lives in Barkshire, England. So I'm so glad that she took the time to

chat with us about her research and about what drew her to Lambert Simmel's story. Let's jump

right in. What drew you to Lambert Semmel's story? It's somebody that people still argue about is kind of elusive in a lot of ways, sort of niche.

What was it that actually drew you to Lambert Semmel?

It was really unexpected, actually.

So at the time, I was meant to be writing a sci-fi novel, the follow-up to my first.

...