Mary Loudon was born in November 1966, the yyoungest of five children. Brought up and educated in Wantage, Oxfordshire, she left school in 1985 and spent the following years washing up in a Cornish hotel; child-minding and acting in London and America; and weeding peanut crops on a kibbutz in Israel. She read Theatre Studies at Warwick and received am award from the university towards her subsequent work in a street clinic in Calcutta, winning the Margaret Rhonda Award from the Society of Authors for her work towards Unveiled. Unveiled also won her a 1992 'Achievement Award from Cosmopoitan magazine. She reviews regularly for the Independent, and has written for the Observer, The Sunday Times, the Independent on Sunday, the Sunday Telepgraph, the Guardian, the New Statesman, the Daily Mail, the Sydney Morning Herald, the British Medical Journal, the Tablet and the Catholic Herald. Her poetry has been published in an anthology of new writing, and she has appeared a s a guest on radio and television programmes. Mary Loudon lives in London.
