Liz Jensen was born in Oxfordshire, the daughter of a Danish violin-maker and an Anglo-Moroccan librarian who met in a youth hostel in Avignon in the 1950s. She wrote her first novel, The Ghost with the Wooden Leg, at the age of eight. Flabbergastingly, and with an injustice which stings her to this day, it never got published - but she didn’t abandon her dream of becoming a writer.

'I always knew I had a book in me,' she says. 'I just didn’t have a clue how to get it out.' This led to her indulging in many displacement activities: she has worked as a newspaper reporter in Hongkong, a DJ in Taiwan, a BBC producer in Britain, and a sculptor in France. It was motherhood which finally allowed her the time and freedom to begin writing again. 'I was going to write a novel if it killed me,' she says. 'Which it nearly did.' Four books on, she is now a full-time writer. Amicably divorced, she lives in London with her two high-octane Anglo-French sons and a gerbil called Ron.