Novelist, playwright, and screenwriter, Fay Weldon CBE was brought up in New Zealand and returned to the United Kingdom when she was ten. She read Economics and Psychology at the University of St Andrews in Scotland, and worked briefly for the Foreign Office in London, then as a journalist, and then as an advertising copywriter. She later gave up her career in advertising, and began to write full-time. Her first novel, The Fat Woman’s Joke, was published in 1967. She was Chair of the Judges for the Booker Prize for Fiction in 1983, and received an honorary doctorate from the University of St Andrews in 1990. In 2001 she was awarded a CBE.Fay Weldon’s work includes over twenty novels, five collections of short stories, several children's books, non-fiction books, magazine articles and a number of plays written for television, radio and the stage, including the pilot episode for the television series ‘Upstairs, Downstairs’.Fay’s memoir, Auto Da Fay, was published in 2002 by HarperCollins who also published her latest nonfiction work What Makes Women Happy (Fourth Estate) in September 2006. Quercus published The Stepmother’s Diary in September 2008, and her novel Chalcot Crescent was published in September 2009 by Corvus, followed by Kehua! in 2010. She is currently working on her Love & Inheritance trilogy for Head of Zeus, who published the first in the series, Habits of the House, in June 2012.