Claire Tomalin

Claire Tomalin is the author of highly acclaimed biographies of Mary Wollstonecraft, Katherine Mansfield, and Jane Austen. Her account of Charles Dickens' relationship with the actress Nelly Ternan won the James Tait Blackwell Memorial Prize for Biography and the Hawthornden Prize and her biography of the seventeenth-century diarist Samual Pepys won the 2002 Whitbread Book of the Year Award. Ms. Tomalin also wrote The Winter Wife, a play based on her biography of Katherine Mansfield, and she edited the first edition of a previously undiscovered manuscript by Mary Shelly, Maurice, or the Fisher's Cot. Her most recent book is Time-Torn Man: A Life of Thomas Hardy. Early in her career, Ms. Tomalin worked in publishing and journalism serving as the literary editor for The New Statesman and for the Sunday Times newspaper. She has served on the Committee of the London Library and on the Advisory Committee for the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at the British Library, and as a Trustee of the National Portrait Gallery and the Wordsworth Trust. She is a Vice-President of the Royal Literary Fund and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, is an honorary Fellow of her Cambridge college, Newnham, and has honorary doctorates from the universities of East Anglia and Birmingham. Ms. Tomalin graduated from Newnham College in Cambridge.