D.J. Taylor was born in 1960, went to Norwich School and St John's College, Oxford, and is the author of two acclaimed biographies,  Thackerary (1999), and Orwell: The Life, which won the Whitbread Biography Prize in 2003.  He has written eleven novels, the most recent being The Windsor Faction (2013),joint winner of the Sidewise Award for Alternate History, Derby Day (2011),long-listed for the Man Booker Prize, At the Chime of a City Clock (2010), Ask Alice (2009) and Kept: A Victorian Mystery (2006). 

David is also well known as a critic and reviewer, and his other books include A Vain Conceit: British Fiction in the 1980s (1989) and After the War: the Novel and England since 1945 (1993). His journalism appears in the Independent and the Independent on Sunday, the Guardian, The Tablet, the Spectator, the Wall Street Journal and, anonymously, in Private Eye. He is married to the novelist Rachel Hore.  They have three sons and live in Norwich, UK.