Jane Shilling

Jane Shilling is a critic and columnist, and the author of two books of memoir, The Fox in the Cupboard (2004), about horses and single motherhood, and The Stranger in the Mirror (2011) about the experience of middle age. The Stranger in the Mirror was a Radio 4 Book of the Week and was translated into Italian, Swedish and Chinese. 

Jane was born in Kent and read English at St Hugh’s College, Oxford. She worked for the publishers Viking Penguin, and the literary agency Anthony Sheil Associates, and later as a sub-editor on the Daily Telegraph arts pages and weekly magazine, and as deputy features editor of the Times. She became a freelance writer in 1998 and has written on books, theatre, ballet, music and fashion for publications including the New Statesman, Prospect magazine, the Evening Standard and the Daily Telegraph, for which she writes a weekly column. She has appeared at literary festivals and on television and radio, where she is a contributor to Radio 3’s The Essay. She was a judge on the biography panel of the 2015 Costa book awards. 

She moved to Greenwich with her baby son in 1993 and has lived there ever since. She is currently working on two books – a memoir about clothes and a novel based on the life of a nineteenth-century Russian artist – and a play inspired by her centenarian former next-door neighbour. In her spare time she tries not to fall off her unruly ex-racehorse.