Novelist Jane Gardam was born in Coatham, North Yorkshire on 11 July 1928. She was educated at Saltburn High School for Girls, and won a scholarship to the University of London where she read English at Bedford College.

Her first book for adults was a collection of linked short stories about Jamaica, and won both the David Higham Prize for Fiction and the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize. Subsequent collections of short stories have won the Katherine Mansfield Award and the PEN/Macmillan Silver Pen Award (1995).

Jane has written novels and in 1999 Jane Gardam was awarded the Heywood Hill Literary Prize in recognition of a distinguished literary career.

Jane Gardam is a member of PEN and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She is married with three children and divides her time between East Kent and Yorkshire.