Elizabeth Day

Elizabeth Day won Young Journalist of the Year at the 2004 British Press Awards and spent nearly a decade writing features for The Observer. Her debut, Scissors Paper Stone, received one of the Society of Authors' Betty Trask Awards in 2012, a set of annual prizes for first novels by writers under thirty-five. Magpie, published in 2021, was her fifth novel and her first fiction since The Party in 2017. Marisa and Jake have been together only a few months and are trying for a baby when money forces them to take in a lodger, Kate, whose interest in the couple is hard to place; partway through, the telling passes to Kate. Day has spoken publicly about her own rounds of IVF. Since 2018 she has hosted the interview podcast How to Fail with Elizabeth Day, which took the Rising Star prize at the 2019 British Podcast Awards, and she presented Open Book on BBC Radio 4 from 2021 until the programme ended in 2024.