Participant Image (270 x 155 px):

Claire Tomalin was born in London. After graduating from Newnham College, Cambridge, she worked in publishing before switching to journalism, becoming literary editor of both the New Statesman magazine and the Sunday Times newspaper. She is the author of highly acclaimed biographies of Jane Austen, Thomas Hardy, Samuel Pepys, Mary Wollstonecraft and Katherine Mansfield. Her account of Charles Dickens' relationship with the actress Nelly Ternan, The Invisible Woman: The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens, (1990) won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize (for biography), the NCR Book Award for Non-Fiction and the Hawthornden Prize. It was followed by Mrs. Jordan's Profession, a biography of the actress Dora Jordan, consort to William IV. Her play The Winter Wife (1991) is based on her own biography of Katherine Mansfield. Claire Tomalin lives in London with her husband, the playwright and novelist Michael Frayn. Her biography of the seventeenth-century diarist Samuel Pepys,(2002) won the the Samuel Pepys Award, and the 2002 Whitbread Book of the Year award. Her book Thomas Hardy: The Time-Torn Man, (2006) was shortlisted for the British Book Awards Biography of the Year. 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2006/nov/18/featuresreviews.guardianrevi... - A review of Tomalin's work in The Guardian. 

Claire Tomalin is brought to the Galle Literary Festival by The British Council.

Claire Tomalin will be featured at the following events:

Saturday 30 January, 2.15 PM - 3.15 PM, Hall de Galle: Hidden Lives

Saturday 30 January, 8.00 PM - 10.00 PM, Amangalla: Literary Dinner 

Sunday 31 January, 11.15 AM - 12.15 PM, Hall de Galle: Lives of Cities

Click on Programme for more details about these events!