Jennifer Dawson Author

Jennifer Dawson (1929 - 2000) was born in London to a family of Fabian socialists. She read History at Oxford, where she was hospitalised for a breakdown. After graduating, she worked as a teacher, dictionary indexer and welfare worker. Her experience both as a mental health professional and a patient inspired her 1961 debut The Ha-Ha, which won that year's James Tait Black Memorial Prize as well as being adapted for the stage and broadcast by the BBC. In 1959 Dawson was awarded the Dawes Hicks Scholarship for Philosophy to study at UCL. She was committed to the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and met her husband during the 1963 Aldermaston March. They lived in Oxfordshire, where she wrote six more novels and short stories. She died in 2000.

Daisy Johnson was born in 1990. Her debut short-story collection, Fen, was published in 2016. In 2018 she became the youngest author ever to be shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize with her debut novel Everything Under. She is the winner of the Harper's Bazaar Short Story Prize, the A. M. Heath Prize and the Edge Hill Short Story Prize. She currently lives in Oxford by the river.