Charlotte Mendelson was born in London and grew up in Oxford.

Her fifth novel, The Sunday Times bestselling The Exhibitionist, was longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction and was The Times Novel of the Year 2022, as well as a book of the year in The Guardian and Good Housekeeping.

Her other novels include Wife, her most recent, and Almost English, which was longlisted for both the Man Booker and the Women’s Prize for Fiction; When We Were Bad, which was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction and was a book of the year in The Observer, The Guardian, The Sunday Times, The New Statesman and The Spectator. Her second novel, Daughters of Jerusalem, won both the Somerset Maugham Award and the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize; she was also shortlisted for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, and was chosen as a Waterstones 25 Authors of the Future. She is also the author of Rhapsody in Green, a memoir of gardening obsession. Her books have been translated into nine languages, and she is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Charlotte worked in publishing for twenty years, has been a columnist for The New Yorker and The Financial Times Weekend and currently has a fortnightly column about nature, gardening, food, craft and travel for The Observer. She has also written extensively for The Guardian, The Times, The Sunday Times and elsewhere, and broadcasts frequently for BBC Radio 4 and 3. She lives in London.