Kate Summerscale is an award-winning English writer and journalist. She is the author of The Suspicions of Mr Whicher or The Murder at Road Hill House which won the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-fiction 2008, and the bestselling The Queen of Whale Cay, which won a Somerset Maugham Award in 1998 and was shortlisted for the 1997 Whitbread Awards for biography. She was brought up in Japan, England, and Chile. After attending Bedales School (1978–1983), she took a double-first at Oxford University and received an MA in Journalism from Stanford University. She lives in London with her son.