When Labyrinth, Kate Mosse’s fifth book, was published in 2005, it soared to the number one spot on bestseller lists around the world. Since then it has been adapted for TV, starring the fabulous Vanessa Kirby and Jessica Brown Findlay, and executive produced by Ridley Scott. She’s been made an OBE and CBE for services to literature, women and charity, having co-founded the Women’s Prize, one of the UK’s most prestigious literary awards, in 1996. We caught up with Kate to talk about how she’s championing women in the creative industries and embracing new challenges.

You’re about to embark on a theatre tour to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the publication of your book Labyrinth. What can audiences expect from the show?

It’s a one-woman immersive theatre show with film, music, special effects and lights. A soon as audiences walk into the theatre, they’ll feel transported to medieval France, where much of the book is set. It’s like a cross between Simon Callow doing Dickens and Madonna. It’s a performance. I’ll be telling the story of the inspiration behind Labyrinth and how the characters came to me; falling in love with Carcassonne in the south-west of France. And I’ll be showing the real history that underpins the novel – Nazi grail-hunters, Egyptian hieroglyphics, the crusade against the Cathars and the story of labyrinths themselves and why they became so important in medieval Europe. So a mix of storytelling and documentary. With a smoke machine.

What are the challenges of making the leap from writing into performance?

With my previous show, Warrior Queens and Quiet Revolutionaries, I discovered a new passion in my 60s, which was performance. I’ve always been a public speaker: running the Women’s Prize and now the Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction, I do a great deal of hosting, giving lectures and chairing events. But doing a book event or giving a speech is not the same as being a performer, so that was very different. It was the most terrifying moment of my whole career when, in my 60s, I was standing backstage for the first preview of Warrior Queens and the music started. But I did it. It’s so exhilarating, there’s nothing like performing in front of a live audience.

In much of your work, you’ve given a voice to persecuted and maginalised peoples, often specifically women, who’ve been silenced. How important is it to you as a writer to elevate these lost voices?

It’s at the heart of everything I do: fiction, non-fiction, setting up the Women’s Prize and now the Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction. Everything I do comes back to the idea that if history isn’t the story of all of us, it isn’t really history. The living of history has never left women out, but the writing of it has. Either they’re ignored or deliberately erased. For me, it’s not about telling an alternative history, it’s telling the real history. The thing about Labyrinth is that there are so many grail legends but they’re almost always told from a male perspective. I wanted to tell a story with women’s voices at its heart.

So, by performing you’re effectively embodying the idea that women can and should be centre stage and at the heart of the story?

In a way, I’m practicing what I preach. You can’t talk about creating space for women’s voices and then not speak yourself. I’m lucky that I enjoy people and I enjoy speaking, but I also believe that if you’re given an opportunity, give it a go. If it doesn’t work out, dust yourself down and do something else, rather than being fearful of failure. It’s better to try and not pull it off than to be too scared to try. Now that I’m in my mid 60s, it’s not that I care less, but I do want to make the most of everything and consequently maybe I am a little bit bolder.

What message would you like readers to take away from your books?

I don’t really think like that. Each of my books is it’s own self and I don’t really go into it with a set of themes or lessons to take away. But, I suppose in a broader sense, I do believe that every one of us has a voice that matters and can make a difference. And that sometimes, in very difficult and complicated times, it’s easy to think there’s nothing you can do as an individual. But I do believe that every single one of us can make a difference and that standing up for what you believe in, using your voice and being proud of who you are, is something to strive for. So I suppose all of my books are about that, about not being silenced, whether it works out or not.

Place, landscape and setting are central to your novels, almost as though they’re characters in themselves. Is place an important factor for you in the writing process?

You’re right, it’s the first inspiration for every novel I’ve written. Arriving in Carcassonne for the first time in November 1989, it was misty and dark and I walked through the medieval town to Pont Vieux, the old bridge that goes across the river, and saw the city for the first time. I fell in love and felt I belonged there. It was the first time I felt what I know refer to as ‘the whispering in the landscape’, the idea that there are characters just slightly out of sight and, if I can just stand still quietly for long enough, I’ll hear their voices. Every novel that I’ve written starts with place; it never starts with ideas, or history, or characters, it’s always place first. So that’s one of the reasons why it’s important this show feels immersive, that people feel they’re in Carcassonne, because I know that place in my writing is very important to readers and to audiences.

You’re a full time carer to your mother-in-law now, having raised your own family. You’re certainly spinning a lot of plates. How do you keep that creative thread running through your own life?

In my own life, I haven’t seen family life as antithetical to creativity. If anything I would say that becoming a mother – I have two children and now I have a grandson as well – made me more efficient. You have to take the time to write when you can. I certainly became more productive once I became a mother. It’s about the support you have around you. Family is the most important thing to me but it shouldn’t be a choice between one and the other. It should be that all of us can make a contribution in family life and in working life. This is the goal, this is what my generation of feminists were marching for, so it’s our responsibility to live that. This thing where women feel guilty all of the time, well why? Let’s just decide not to. There is no need to feel guilty, it’s corrosive.

I spend a lot of time these days with older women in their 80s and 90s and I see that older women are always ignored and overlooked, so it’s very important for me to put those women into my stories. But also to have women in my novels who are fulfilled and happy who have not had children, because it’s important to recognise that having children is not the only way to be happy and fulfilled. The only thing that any of us can hope for is the capacity and the right to be ourselves, whatever that self is.

You seem to have avoided that thing that many women writers encounter where their work is packaged up as so-called chick-lit, regardless of the content. Has that ever been an issue for you?

Seventy percent of novels are bought by women, so it makes commercial sense to target that demographic, but I didn’t want any figures on my book jackets. No women, no men, no flowers. I write historical adventure and I was very clear at the outset that we were not selling to women or to men, but to readers.

Is there a book you wish you’d written?

Wuthering Heights, the great landscape novel. It was published in 1847 and it changed what it was possible for women to write. It was denounced as being immoral at the time and it’s not a conventional love story, it’s a story of obsession and of a brutal, tough, loveless world. Back to telling all the truth of history, not just the palatable bits. It’s the most extraordinary of novels, so that would be the one for me.

What does your writing day look like?

Writing the first draft is all emotion. It’s about getting a book down on paper so I can sit back and see what book I’m writing, because I write very organically. Once I’ve done all my research I just start writing and see who turns up. So my first draft is a splurge and when I’m doing that it’s eight hours a days, seven days a week. But because of my domestic responsibilities I start very early in the day, at about four in the morning, and it means I can have four hours before I’m needed. I’m working on a non-fiction book at the moment and I’ve been working on it while I’ve been touring for my latest novel, The Map of Bones. I’ve written five hours a day on the road because I’m good at sitting down in a café and just getting on with it.

What’s the new book about?

It’s a YA book inspired by Warrior Queens and Quiet Revolutionaries called Feminist History for Every Day of the Year. It’s about empowerment but it’s also a book that says: knowing how we got to the place we are now, knowing how our rights have come to be our rights, is essential. Because rights given can be taken away, as we are seeing. So it’s slightly salutary as a feminist of my generation to talk to 14-year-old girls who don’t know about Greenham Common.

Do you have any words of advice for those young women?

I think the point is for every young woman to feel confident about who they are and the way they want to use their voice. Some people like to be behind the scenes, some people want to be the woman at the front carrying a flag. The point is there’s no right way, they only thing is to be true to yourself.

Tickets for Labyrinth Live: Unlocking the Secrets of the Labyrinth are on sale now 

Labyrinth: 20th Anniversary Edition by Kate Mosse is published by Phoenix on 20 Feb, £30