Biography

Louise Doughty was born in 1963 in the East Midlands, UK. She grew up in Rutland, England's smallest county, a rural area that later provided the setting for her third novel, Honey-Dew. She attended Leeds University, where she took a BA in English Literature and the University of East Anglia where she did the famous MA in Creative Writing course with Malcolm Bradbury and Angela Carter.

After graduating from the course, she moved to London and spent the rest of her twenties in a series of temporary jobs including teaching, bar jobs and secretarial work. It was her experiences as a temp secretary that provided the material for her first novel, Crazy Paving (1995), a black comedy about accidents, Chaos Theory and urban terrorism. That was followed by Dance With Me (1996), a novel about ghosts, mental illness and sexual betrayal, and Honey-Dew, a satire of the traditional English mystery.

After her first three novels, Doughty took a dramatic departure with her fourth, the internationally acclaimed Fires in the Dark, the first in a series of long novels based on the history of the Romany people and her own family ancestry. It was followed by Stone Cradle in 2006.  Last year, she published her first work of non-fiction, A Novel in a Year.

Doughty also writes radio plays and journalism and broadcasts regularly for BBC Radio 4. She lives in London.