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Biographer Claire Tomalin was born in London in 1933. After graduating from Newnham College, Cambridge, she worked in publishing for Heinemann, Hutchinson and Cape before switching to journalism, becoming literary editor of both the New Statesman magazine and the Sunday Times newspaper. 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.
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, The Invisible Woman: The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens, was published in 1990 and won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize (for biography), the NCR Book Award for Non-Fiction and the Hawthornden Prize. It was followed by Mrs Jordan's Profession (1994), a biography of the actress Dora Jordan, consort to William IV.
Her play The Winter Wife (1991) is based on her own biography of Katherine Mansfield, and she edited the first edition of a previously undiscovered manuscript by Mary Shelley, Maurice, or the Fisher's Cot, first published in 1998. A collection of book reviews and journalism, Several Strangers: Writing from Three Decades, was published in 1999.
Claire Tomalin lives in London with her husband, the playwright and novelist Michael Frayn. Her biography of the seventeenth-century diarist Samuel Pepys (2002) won the the Samuel Pepys Award, and the 2002 Whitbread Book of the Year award. Her book Thomas Hardy: The Time-Torn Man (2006), was shortlisted for the British Book Awards Biography of the Year. She has recently selected and edited two books of poetry: The Poems of Thomas Hardy (2007), and The Poems of John Milton (2008).
In 2011, Claire Tomalin's new biography, Charles Dickens: A Life was published, and shortlisted for the 2011 Costa Biography Award.
