Ann Thwaite is a Whitbread-Prize-winning biographer and children's writer. She was born in London and was educated at Queen Elizabeth's, Barnet and St Hilda's College, Oxford. She has written several major biographies. A. A. Milne: His Life won the Whitbread Biography of the Year in 1990. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and an Honorary Fellow of Roehampton University (National Centre for Research into Children's Literature). She holds 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.