Novelist Maggie Gee was born in Poole, Dorset, and educated at state schools and Somerville College, Oxford where she completed two degrees in English.  After working in publishing as an editor, she took a research job at Wolverhampton Polytechnic where she completed a PhD. Her first published novel was Dying, in Other Words (1981), an experimental black comedy in which a supposedly dead woman triumphantly rewrites the story of her own death. In 1982 Maggie Gee was selected as one of the original 20 ‘Best of Young British Novelists’ and became Writing Fellow at the University of East Anglia.

Maggie Gee is a Fellow and Vice-President of the Royal Society of Literature. She has been a member of the Society of Authors’ Committee of Management and the government Public Lending Right committee, and was from 2004-2008 the first female Chair of Council of the Royal Society of Literature. She is now one of its Vice Presidents. She is Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at Sheffield Hallam University and lives in London with her husband, the writer and broadcaster, Nicholas Rankin. In 2012 she was awarded an OBE for services to literature.