Claire Tomalin

After graduating from Newnham College, Cambridge, Claire Tomalin worked in publishing before becoming literary editor of both the New Statesman magazine and the Sunday Times newspaper. Her first book, The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft, won the Whitbread First Book Award, and she has since written a number of highly acclaimed and bestselling biographies. They include Jane Austen: A Life, The Invisible Woman, a definitive account of Dickens' relationship with the actress Ellen Ternan, which won three major literary awards, and Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self was Whitbread Book of the Year in 2002. Her biography Charles Dickens: A Life, provides an in-depth biography of the author. She is a trustee of the National Portrait Gallery, London and the Wordsworth Trust, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a Vice-President of English PEN. She is married to the writer Michael Frayn.