Marie Phillips was born in London. After working in television documentaries and as an independent bookseller, she published her first novel, Gods Behaving Badly, in 2007. It became an international bestseller, was translated into over twenty languages, and was made into a film starring Sharon Stone and Christopher Walken. Her second novel, The Table of Less Valued Knights, was longlisted for the 2015 Baileys Prize for Fiction. Her third, Oh, I Do Like To Be..., was published in January 2019. With Robert Hudson, she wrote the BBC Radio 4 series Warhorses of Letters, which starred Stephen Fry and Daniel Rigby, and Some Hay in a Manger, starring Tamsin Greig and Joel Fry. As part of a shadowy cabal of like-minded women, she published the erotic spoof Fifty Shelves of Grey, under the name Vanessa Parody. She is currently studying storytelling at the Mezrab Storytelling School in Amsterdam.