This book explores contemporary women's historical fiction from global perspectives and expands substantially on existing studies by drawing on intersectional, transnational and decolonial approaches to examine texts originating in different languages and engaging with diverse time periods, contexts and cultural settings. The chapters explore how the genre of women's historical fiction unearths women's historical experiences and adds to historical narratives in order to counter and challenge colonial, heteropatriarchal 'official' histories. The collection addresses how women writers utilise the genre to reclaim personal and collective memory as well as write back into history marginalised, oppressed and overlooked subjectivities, especially those of racialised, migrant, disabled, LGBTQIA+ and other minoritised communities.

Chapter 1 of this book is available open access under a CC BY 4.0 license at link.springer.com, thanks to the generous support of Trinity College Dublin Trust.

Catherine Barbour is Assistant Professor in Hispanic Studies at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland. She specialises in contemporary Iberian literature and visual culture, with keen interests in comparative literature. Catherine has published widely on intersectional approaches to gender in Galician cultural production and is the author of Contemporary Galician Women Writers (2020).

Karunika Kardak has a PhD in Hispanic Studies from the University of St Andrews, UK, and is the author of Memory, Identity and the Historical Novel in Uruguay: Opening up the Archive 1985-2010 (2023).