Joanna Trollope is the author of many highly acclaimed and bestselling novels, including The Rector's Wife, Marrying the Mistress and Daughters in Law.

She was appointed OBE in 1996, and a trustee of the National Literacy Trust in in 2012. She has chaired the Whitbread and Orange Awards, as well as being a judge of many other literature prizes; she has been part of two DCMS panels on public libraries and is patron of numerous charities, including Meningitis Now, and Chawton House Library.

In 2014, she updated Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility as the opening novel in the Austen Project. City of Friends is her twentieth novel.