Sarah Gristwood was born in Kent and read English at St Anne’s College, Oxford. She started in journalism while at university, doing vacation work for Tina Brown on Tatler magazine. Going on to work as a freelance, she first wrote about theatre - along with general features on everything from female cricket to early women novelists. But increasingly she specialised in film profiles, interviewing everyone from Robert De Niro to Clint Eastwood; from Sharon Stone to Martin Scorsese. Her pieces appeared in newspapers including The Guardian, the Telegraph, the Mail and the Independent, and in magazines from Cosmopolitan to Sight and Sound, and The New Statesman to Empire. She is married to the film critic Derek Malcolm, and they divide their time between north London and a seventeenth century dower house in Kent.

A former journalist and broadcaster, Sarah Gristwood is the author of two historical biographies. Her first, Arbella: England’s Lost Queen (Bantam 2003) reached the Sunday Times bestsellers’ list; her second, Perdita: Royal Mistress, Writer, Romantic (Bantam 2005) was selected as Radio 4 Book of the Week. In 1988 she wrote Recording Angels: The Secret World of Women’s Diaries (Harrap), which will be published by Bantam in 2006 in a revised and extended edition (working title: In This Book).

The subjects of her two biographies have each a colourful story. Lady Arbella Stuart was expected to inherit the throne of her kinswoman, Queen Elizabeth I. Raised a virtual prisoner by her grandmother Bess of Hardwick, she made a dramatic bid for life, liberty and perhaps the crown – and left a host of extraordinary letters which are used to the full in Sarah Gristwood’s book.

Mary Robinson - widely known as “Perdita” - began her career as actress, royal mistress, and inhabitant of a debtors’ prison She ended it, just two decades later, as a best-selling novelist, Romantic poet, and early feminist thinker of note. As Coleridge wrote after her death in 1800: “I never knew a human Being with so full a mind – bad, good & indifferent, I grant you, but full, & overflowing.” Again, you could hardly have a better recipe for the subject of a biography.

Agent: Araminta Whitley at LAW (Lucas Alexander Whitley) - 0207 471 7900

Email: sarah.gristwood@virgin.net