Margaret Forster

Who is Margaret Forster?

Margaret Forster is an English author. She was born in Carlisle, England, where she attended Carlisle and County High School for Girls, and then won an Open Scholarship to read modern history at Somerville College, Oxford, from where she graduated in 1960.

After a short period as a teacher at Barnsbury Girls' School in Islington, north London, she has worked as a novelist, biographer and freelance literary critic, contributing regularly to book programmes on television, to BBC Radio 4 and various newspapers and magazines. She was a member of the BBC Advisory Committee on the Social Effects of Television, the Arts Council Literary Panel, and chief reviewer for non-fiction in the Evening Standard. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1975.

Forster is married to the writer, journalist and broadcaster Hunter Davies. They live in London and in the Lake District.

She is the author of many successful novels, including Georgy Girl, Lady's Maid, Diary of an Ordinary Woman, Have the Men Had Enough?