Jenny Uglow grew up in Cumbria. A former Editorial Director of Chatto & Windus, she is the author of prize-winning biographies and cultural histories, from The Lunar Men: the Friends who made the Future (2002) to In These Times: Living in Britain through Napoleon's Wars, 1793-1815 (2014). Her interest in text and image is explored in Words and Pictures: Writers, Artists and a Peculiarly British Tradition (2008), and in biographies of William Hogarth, Thomas Bewick, Walter Crane and most recently in Mr Lear: A Life of Art and Nonsense, winner of the Hawthornden Prize in 2018. She was created an OBE in 2008, and was Chair of the Royal Society of Literature 2014-2016. She lives in Canterbury and Borrowdale, Cumbria.