Natalie Haynes is a writer and broadcaster and – according to the Washington Post – a rock star mythologist. Her first novel, The Amber Fury, was published to great acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic, as was The Ancient Guide to Modern Life, her previous book. Her second novel, The Children of Jocasta, was published in 2017. Her retelling of the Trojan War, A Thousand Ships, was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2020. It has been translated into more languages than she can now remember. Her most recent book, No Friend to This House, retells the story of Medea.

Natalie’s non-fiction book, Pandora’s Jar: Women in the Greek Myth was published in October 2020 and reached No. 2 in the New York Times Best Sellers list. Divine Might, on goddesses in Greek Myth was published in 2023 and was a bestseller in the UK and elsewhere. Natalie has been speaking on the modern relevance of the classical world for the last fifteen years, on tours which have spanned many countries and three continents. Her show, Natalie Haynes Stands Up for the Classics, has been broadcast on Radio 4, with all series available now on BBC Sounds.

Learn more about Pandora’s Jar: Women in the Greek Myths and other books by Natalie Haynes.

The Greek myths are among the world’s most important cultural building blocks and they have been retold many times, but rarely do they focus on the remarkable women at the heart of these ancient stories.

Stories of gods and monsters are the mainstay of epic poetry and Greek tragedy, from Homer to Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, from the Trojan War to Jason and the Argonauts. And still, today, a wealth of novels, plays and films draw their inspiration from stories first told almost three thousand years ago. But modern tellers of Greek myth have usually been men and have routinely shown little interest in telling women’s stories. And when they do, those women are often painted as monstrous, vengeful or just plain evil. But Pandora – the first woman, who according to legend unloosed chaos upon the world – was not a villain, and even Medea and Phaedra have more nuanced stories than generations of retellings might indicate.

Now, in Pandora’s Jar, author Natalie Haynes – broadcaster, writer and passionate classicist – redresses this imbalance. Taking Pandora and her jar (the box came later) as the starting point, she puts the women of the Greek myths on equal footing with the menfolk. After millennia of stories telling of gods and men, be they Zeus or Agamemnon, Paris or Odysseus, Oedipus or Jason, the voices that sing from these pages are those of Hera, Athena and Artemis, and of Clytemnestra, Jocasta, Eurydice and Penelope.