Kate Colquhoun

Kate Colquhoun is a biographer and historian. Her first book A Thing in Disguise: the visionary life of Joseph Paxton (Fourth Estate, 2003) was shortlisted for the Duff Cooper prize, nominated for the Samuel Johnson award and was a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week. Other books include Taste: the history of Britain through its cooking (Bloomsbury, 2007) and The Thrifty Cookbook: 476 Ways to eat well with leftovers (Bloomsbury, 2009).

Mr Briggs’ Hat (Little, Brown, 2011) was shortlisted for a Crime Writers’ Association silver dagger award, translated widely and filmed for BBC TV. Her next book Did She Kill Him? (Little, Brown 2014), investigates the story of Florence Maybrick, an American ingénue tried for the murder of her older cotton-broker husband James in Liverpool in 1889.

Kate reviews and writes widely for the national papers, particularly the Sunday Times and the Daily Telegraph. She helped to make The Truth about Food for Channel 4’s Dispatches series, and appears often on radio and TV. She particularly loved teaching Faber Academy’s narrative non-fiction course in 2011. For her next project, Kate will investigate gender equality around the world, asking ‘How Equal is Almost Equal?’ She lives in west London with her two sons.