Claire Tomalin

Claire Tomalin is a Londoner, born of a French father and English mother, and a graduate of Cambridge University. She worked in publishing and journalism while her children were young, becoming literary editor of the New Statesman and then the London Sunday Times.

Her first book, The Life And Death Of Mary Wollstonecraft, was published in 1974 and won the Whitbread First Book Prize. After this came Shelley and his World (1980); Katherine Mansfield: A Secret Life (1987); and The Invisible Woman: The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens (1991), which won the NCR Award, the Hawthornden Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.

Her play about Mansfield, The Winter Wife, was produced in 1991. In 1994 came Mrs Jordan's Profession, a study of the Regency actress, and in 1997 Jane Austen: A Life. Several Strangers: Writing From Three Decades (1999) was followed in 2002 by Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self, which won the Whitbread Biography Prize and Whitbread Book of the Year, the Pepys Society Prize and the Rose Crawshay Prize. It was also one of the New York Times' 10 best books of the year in 2003.

Thomas Hardy: The Time-Torn Man appeared in 2006, and in the same year she made a South Bank Show film with Melvyn Bragg about Hardy. In October 2011 her Charles Dickens: A Life was published by Viking.

Lionsgate