Philippa Stockley

Philippa Stockley read English at Oxford and art-historical clothing history at the Courtauld Institute as a two-year MA. Having written her first novel at eight, she worked as a designer (clothing, stage, interiors, graphic); exhibiting painter; and an editor (for 10 years as deputy editor of Homes & Property magazine at the London Evening Standard, at which newspaper she was also a columnist).

She published her first novel The Edge of Pleasure (a contemporary novel about an immoral painter) in 2001, and her second A Factory of Cunning, an epistolary sequel to Les Liaisons Dangereuses written in 18th-century English, in 2005. Both books were bestsellers and were nominated for the Booker prize. She has published short stories in Areté magazine.

Philippa writes features on art, conservation, architecture, design, clothing and interiors, and reviews literature and art. She writes frequently for the London Evening Standard and Country Life, has reviewed for the Sunday Telegraph, Financial Times, New Statesman, Spectator and TLS, and has written opinion columns for the Independent. She lives in a restored, listed Regency hovel in Whitechapel in the East End of London. She is currently working on her sequel to Les Liaisons Dangereuses, to be published as Murderous Liaisons in the year of the Georgian tercentenary.