Lucy Cavendish

Lucy Cavendish was born in the Home Counties in 1966. After school, she spent a year teaching in Kenya and began a love affair with Africa that is still on-going now. In fact, she has lived all over the world from Argentina to Zimbabwe, New York to Sydney. It was her endless thirst for adventure that won her a first award in journalism as Cosmopolitan's Young Travel Writer of the Year. Since then, she has gone on to carve a very successful career in journalism writing for the Times, the Telegraph, the Guardian, the Daily Mail and many women's magazines. She writes a column for Stella magazine for the Sunday Telegraph about her life as a Country Mother of Four. A few years ago, she was asked to take her experiences as a mother, a wife, a partner and an ex-partner to write a fictitous book. Her heroine, Samantha Smythe, is loosely based on herself but, as the Samantha Smythe trilogy grew, so her characters and story lines became increasingly less associated with her life. Her fourth novel, the Broken-Hearted Wives Club, is out next year.

Lucy Cavendish is also a member of the influential Contemporary Womens Writer's Group and has contributed two stories to their first collection The Leap Year. A second collection of stories will be out this autumn. She is also a founder member of Queen Bee press.

She lives in Oxfordshire with her partner, their four children, two dogs, two cats, a horse, a pony, two goldfish and four chickens. Lucy is thinking of getting a goat.