Menna van Praag

Menna van Praag is a bestselling author whose work reflects her fascination with finding the magical in the mundane. Her first novel, Men, Money and Chocolate (Hay House, 2009), tells a fable about a waitress who longs to be a writer; it has been translated into twenty-six languages. With her series of magical realism novels, The House at the End of Hope Street, The Dress Shop of Dreams, The Lost Art of Letter Writing, The Witches of Cambridge, The Patron Saint of Lost Souls (Allison & Busby, 2013–2019), Menna van Praag set stories in the bookshops, cafés and colleges of Cambridge, injecting a magical twist into real-life places. She then delved deeper into the fantastical with The Sisters Grimm (Penguin, 2020) which tells the story of four half-sisters, Goldilocks, Red Riding Hood, Cinderella and Belle, who believe themselves to be ordinary before they discover one another and their own gift for the extraordinary in the realm of Everwhere. Menna van Praag is a lecturer in fiction at Cambridge University, and teaches Creative Writing freelance. She has worked as a script reader and editor for BBC Film and TV and has adapted several of her novels into screenplays. Before publishing Men, Money and Chocolate, Menna van Praag was a waitress for ten years while trying to get published. She studied Modern History at Balliol College, Oxford. She lives with her partner, two children and two cats in Cambridge, and is currently writing her first work of historical fiction.