Jacqueline Winspear

Her grandfather came home from the Somme wounded and shell shocked, and the family stories about him pointed Jacqueline Winspear toward the war she has written about ever since. Born on 30 April 1955 and raised in Cranbrook, Kent, she trained at London's Institute of Education, worked in academic publishing and higher education, and moved to America in 1990. Maisie Dobbs, from Soho Press in 2003, introduces a former housemaid turned battlefield nurse who sets up in London in 1929 as a psychologist and investigator; it took the Agatha Award for best first novel, the Macavity for best first novel and an Alex Award. A Sunlit Weapon, seventeenth in the series, reaches October 1942, with an Air Transport Auxiliary pilot fired on from the ground while ferrying a Spitfire, an American serviceman found tied up in an empty barn, and Eleanor Roosevelt's visit to Britain binding the two threads together.