The news was kept secret from all but her immediate family, but she signed up to write five historical romances, starting with her epic, Night Shall Overtake Us (1993), about a group of young idealists growing up during the first world war. This all changed when she gave birth in 1993 to her only child, Felix, and learned on the same day that she had multiple sclerosis. Tall, blond, strikingly attractive, full of salty wit and self-confidence, she was often to be seen in the Groucho Club and helped found the Orange (now Women’s) prize for fiction. She became a regular and glamorous contributor to radio and television, with appearances on BBC Radio 4 programmes such as Woman’s Hour, Start the Week and Kaleidoscope and, in 1990, as a guest on the first episode of the long-running TV news quiz programme Have I Got News for You. Kate was educated at Camden school for girls, and trained with the Anna Scher theatre group.įive Children on the Western Front was published by Faber in 2014, and, as Saunders put it, was ‘the book of my life’. ![]() She and her siblings all eschewed university for careers, mostly in journalism or publishing. Their house in Dartmouth Park Avenue was so chaotic that Kate remarked that “had we not been middle-class, we would probably have been taken into care”. Her father, Basil Saunders, was an early public relations advocate and her mother, Betty (nee Smith), was a reporter on the Church Times. The eldest daughter of six children, Kate was born in London, into a devout Anglo-Catholic family of bohemian charm, warmth and eccentricity. ![]() She also judged the 2007 Women’s prize in the year that it was won by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun. A columnist for the Sunday Times, the Daily Telegraph, the Sunday Express, She and Cosmopolitan, she judged the 1990 Booker prize, and persuaded her fellow judges to choose AS Byatt’s Possession as the winner. It was the start of a career that produced more than 20 novels for adults and children, ranging in genre from historical romance to detective stories to children’s books.
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