Laura Thompson won the Somerset Maugham Award with her first book, The Dogs. She wrote a biographical study of Nancy Mitford, Life in a Cold Climate, and a group biography of the Mitfords, Take Six Girls, which was a New York Times bestseller. She has also written two books about real life murders: A Different Class of Murder, about the Lord Lucan case, and the CWA Dagger-nominated Rex V Edith Thompson. Her memoir of her publican grandmother, The Last Landlady, was nominated three times as a 2018 book of the year. She lives in Richmond.