Novelist, biographer and critic Margaret Drabble was born in Sheffield in 1939, the second daughter of the advocate and novelist John F. Drabble and teacher Kathleen Marie (n eacute;e Bloor).

She was educated at the Mount School, a Quaker boarding school in York, and read English at Newnham College, Cambridge. She became an actor and worked for the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford-upon-Avon before her first novel, A Summer Birdcage, the story of the relationship between two sisters, was published in 1963. By 2012, 17 of Margaret's highly-acclaimed novels had been published.

Margaret was a former Chairman of the National Book League (1980-1982), and was awarded the CBE in 1980 and in 2008 she was made a DBE.

She received the E M Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1973, and holds honorary doctorates from the universities of Sheffield (1976), Manchester (1987), Keele (1988), Bradford (1988), Hull (1992), East Anglia (1994), York (1995) and Cambridge (2006). Margaret Drabble is also the author of biographies of Arnold Bennett (1974) and Angus Wilson (1995), and is editor of both the fifth (1985) and sixth (2000) editions of The Oxford Companion to English Literature.