Andrea Newman was born in Dover and brought up in Shropshire and Cheshire. She was an only child and started trying to write novels at the age of nine. After graduating from London University she worked for a few years as a civil servant and an English teacher before her first completed novel was published in 1964. Since then she has published ten more novels and a book of short stories, but she is perhaps better known for her fifty television scripts, many based on her novels, the best known being A Bouquet of Barbed Wire. She lives in London.