Jane Gardam is the only writer to have been twice awarded the Whitbread Prize for Best Novel of the Year, for The Queen of the Tambourine and The Hollow Land. She also holds a Heywood Hill Literary Prize for a lifetime's contribution to the enjoyment of literature. She is the author of a number of volumes of acclaimed stories including Black Faces, White Faces (David Higham Prize and the Royal Society of Literature's Winifred Holtby Prize); The Pangs of Love (Katherine Mansfield Prize); Going into a Dark House (Silver Pen Award from PEN); Missing the Midnight; and The People on Privilege Hill.

Her novels include God on the Rocks, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, Faith Fox, The Flight of the Maidens and the bestselling Old Filth, which was shortlisted for the Orange Prize in 2005.

Jane Gardam was born in Yorkshire and now lives in east Kent and the Pennines. She is married with three grown-up children. She was awarded an OBE in January 2009.