Anne Swinfen

Ann Swinfen spent her childhood partly in the English Midlands and partly on the east coast of America. She was educated at Wolverhampton Girls’ High School and Somerville College, Oxford, where she read Classics and Mathematics and married a fellow undergraduate, the historian David Swinfen. While bringing up their five children and studying for an MSc in Mathematics and a BA and PhD in English Literature, she had a variety of jobs, including university lecturer, translator, freelance journalist and software designer. She served for nine years on the governing council of the Open University and for five years worked as a manager and editor in the technical author division of an international computer company, but gave up her full-time job to concentrate on her writing, while continuing part-time university teaching.

From 1995 she chaired Dundee Book Events, a voluntary organisation promoting books and authors to the general public. Her first three novels, all with a contemporary setting, The Anniversary, The Travellers, and A Running Tide, were published by Random House, with translations also into Dutch and German. Her latest novel, The Testament of Mariam, marks something of a departure. Set in the first century, it recounts, from an unusual perspective and within a human context, what has been called the greatest story ever told.

Swinfen now lives in Broughty Ferry, with her husband, formerly vice-principal of the University of Dundee, a cocker spaniel, and two Maine coon cats.