Helen Dunmore

Dunmore grew up in Yorkshire, studied English at York, and spent two years teaching in Finland before settling into a long, prolific career spanning fifteen novels, several story collections, and a dozen poetry collections alongside prize-winning children's fiction.

A Spell of Winter (1995) won the inaugural Orange Prize for Fiction in 1996, the award's first-ever winner; she went on to write The Siege, a widely admired novel of the WWII blockade of Leningrad, among other historical fiction.

She died of cancer in Bristol in 2017, shortly after finishing her final poetry collection, Inside the Wave, which won a posthumous Costa Book Award.