Meg ROSOFF

Meg lives in Highbury, London with her husband, the painter Paul Hamlyn, and their daughter Gloria. She was born in Boston, America but has been living in the UK since 1989 and is a British citizen.

How I Live Now was Meg Rosoff’s debut novel, which won the Guardian and Branford Boase Awards and was short-listed for the Orange Prize for New Fiction as well as the Whitbread. It garnered the sort of rave acclaim most writers only ever dream of. Mark Haddon, author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time, championed it right from the beginning, saying, ‘That rare, rare thing, a first novel with a sustained, magical and utterly faultless voice. After five pages I knew that she could persuade me to believe almost anything.’

Meg wrote How I Live Now soon after her sister Debby died of breast cancer at a young age and Meg realised that life was too short to put off writing the novel she'd always been meaning to write. So she asked for a few months leave from her advertising job at J Walter Thompson and set about writing How I Live Now. She sent it to her agent and a few months later Meg found herself at the heart of a furious bidding war between several of the UK's leading publishers. How I Live Now is dedicated to her late sister Debby.

On the verge of publishing glory in August 2004, Meg was also diagnosed with breast cancer. As wonderful reviews and prizes flooded in, she had to turn to the business of survival but thankfully has since been given the all clear.

Passion Pictures and Prospect Entertainment (whose previous credits include the Oscar-winning documentary One Day in September) have secured the film rights to How I Live Now. Since How I Live Now, Meg has gone on to write several award-winning books including Just in Case, which won the coveted and most prestigious children’s book prize, the Carnegie Medal in 2007, and What I Was, set in Suffolk where Meg has a second home.