Pen name Caroline Linden Name Caroline Linden Period 2005 - present | Nationality America Role Author | |
Notable awards RITA award – Best Romance Novella2012 I Love the Earl Books You Only Love Once, Love and Other Scandals, A View to a Kiss, It Takes a Scandal, Love in the Time of Scandal Profiles | ||
Caroline Linden is an American author of historical and contemporary romance. She won Romance Writers of America RITA Award for Best Romance Novella in 2012 for I Love the Earl, making it the first digital-first publication to win this award. Her books have been translated into eleven foreign languages.
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Biography
Linden grew up the daughter of a member of United States Air Force. She earned her undergraduate degree in math from Harvard University and worked doing actuarial coding for a financial services firm. She met her husband in the math department of Harvard.
After a brief stint in Miami, she returned to Boston with her family, which created a break in her computer programming career. She decided to try fiction writing one night when she had nothing to read and a new iMac. After spending five years on three manuscripts, her agent sold What A Woman Needs. She likes writing books set in Regency England because it was "rich in intrigue and drama, with a major war, political upheaval, national scandals and spies, but it was also on the cusp of a new age of invention and scientific discovery. It was a good age for woman, historically speaking. It was also a beautiful age, with an emphasis on graceful architecture, landscaping and fashion—and that always makes a world more appealing."
She credits the original Star Wars trilogy as being a major influence, "The story-telling arc hits every button for me. It's got everything, from sword fights to romance to intrigue to secrets and sacrifice and a really hot pirate. Sorry, blockade runner. And the fate of the universe hangs on all these other storylines coming together. That moment at the end of Return of the Jedi, when Darth Vader is watching as the Emperor zaps Luke, and Luke cries out to him ... that pulls on everything from the series, that one pivotal scene that tips the plot into resolution." She tries to do the same for her books-- "make everything hang together and fit logically so that at the end, a reader can look back and say, 'Oh, now I see it all! Even that random little thing in Chapter Two turned out to play a part.'"
Linden resides near Boston with her husband and two children.
Awards and reception
Linden has finaled twice in the RITA, for A View to a Kiss and Will You Be My Wi-Fi?. She has also received starred reviews in Publishers Weekly and Booklist.