Hilary Spurling

Hilary Spurling has specialized in uncovering secrets kept - in the words of Ivy Compton-Burnett - through long lives and on death-beds'. She won the Duff Cooper Prize and the Heinemann Award for Ivy, and her Paul Scott was rated by reviewers as one of the best biographies written since the war. She is currently researching the second volume of her life of Matisse, to be published by Hamish Hamilton as Matisse: Painter of the South, 1908-1954.

Hilary Spurling was born in England and educated at Oxford University. From 1964 to 1970 she was theatre critic and literary editor of the Spectator. Since then she has been a regular book reviewer for the Observer and the Daily Telegraph. She lives in London with her husband, the playwright John Spurling, with whom she has three children.