Ann Thwaite is an award-winning biographer and children’s writer. She has written five major biographies. The first – Waiting for the Party (later reissued as Beyond the Secret Garden) – of Frances Hodgson Burnett, the author of The Secret Garden, was published in 1974. Edmund Gosse: A Literary Landscape won the 1985 Duff Cooper Prize and was described by John Carey as ‘one of the finest literary biographies of our time’. Emily Tennyson: The Poet’s Wife (1996) is widely regarded as the most interesting biography of Tennyson himself. Glimpses of the Wonderful (2002), a life of Edmund’s father, Philip Henry Gosse, was picked out by D. J. Taylor in the Independent as one of the ‘Ten Best Biographies ever’. A. A. Milne: His Life won the Whitbread Biography of the Year in 1990, and The Brilliant Career of Winnie-the-Pooh, a scrapbook offshoot of her Milne biography, was published in 1992.
Ann is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and an Honorary Fellow of Roehampton University, the National Centre for Research into Children’s Literature. She has an honorary doctorate from the University of East Anglia and a D.Litt from Oxford. She lives in Norfolk with her husband, the poet Anthony Thwaite.