“I had a novel in the back of my mind when I won an Ian St James story competition in 1993. At the award ceremony an agent asked me if I was writing a novel. I showed her four or five chapters of what would become 'Behind the Scenes at the Museum' and to my surprise she auctioned them off.”

English novelist, playwright and short story writer

Kate Atkinson is an English novelist, playwright and short story writer. She is known for fiction that ranges across historical, detective and family novels, and for blending postmodern and magical realist elements into her work. Her debut novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum, won the Whitbread Book Award in 1995. She later won the Costa Book Award for Novel for Life After Life in 2013 and A God in Ruins in 2015. Atkinson is also known for the Jackson Brodie detective novels, which were adapted for BBC One as Case Histories.