Marianne Cronin

A doctorate in applied linguistics from the University of Birmingham came before the fiction. Marianne Cronin, born in 1990 and raised in Warwickshire, worked in academia until her first novel appeared in 2021. The One Hundred Years of Lenni and Margot pairs a seventeen-year-old terminally ill patient in a Glasgow hospital with an eighty-three-year-old woman she meets in the art room. Between them they hold a hundred years, and they set out to paint one picture for each. The book took the American Library Association's Alex Award, which honours adult titles with strong appeal for younger readers, and has been translated into more than twenty-five languages. Cronin's second novel, Eddie Winston Is Looking for Love, appeared in 2024. She lives in the Midlands and performs improv comedy.