Deborah Moggach

Moggach is one of four daughters of writers Charlotte Hough (née Woodyadd) and Richard Hough. Moggach was brought up in Bushey, Hertfordshire and St John's Wood in London, and was educated at Camden School for Girls and Queen's College, London.

She graduated from the University of Bristol in 1971 with a degree in English and trained as a teacher before going to work at the Oxford University Press. She lived in Pakistan for two years in the mid 1970s and in the United States.

Most of her novels are contemporary, tackling family life, divorce, children and the confusions and disappointments of relationships. She has an ear for comedy but has also written a dark thriller set in America, The Stand-In; a bleak story of incest set near London Heathrow Airport, Porky; and a novel pitting Muslim versus English family values, Stolen.

Her two historical novels are Tulip Fever, set in Vermeer’s Amsterdam, and In The Dark, set in a boarding house during the First World War. Her novel, Something To Hide (2015), is set in Texas, London, Beijing, and West Africa. The Indian subcontinent has featured frequently in her work. Her other work includes a stage play and two collections of short stories.

She has adapted many of her novels as TV dramas and has also written acclaimed adaptations of other people's work, among them Nancy Mitford's Love in a Cold Climate, for instance, and The Diary of Anne Frank. Her script of the film Pride and Prejudice, starring Keira Knightley, was nominated for a BAFTA award, and Goggle-Eyes, from Anne Fine's novel, won a Writers Guild Award. These Foolish Things, her comic novel about elderly people moving to India to obtain affordable care, was made into the successful film The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. Tulip Fever has also been made into a film.

In 2005 she was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Bristol; she is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a former Chair of the Society of Authors and was on the executive committee of PEN. She was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2018 New Year Honours for services to literature.[1]

At Oxford University Press she met the man who became her first husband, Tony Moggach; the couple later divorced. He died in November 2015.

For ten years, her partner was the cartoonist Mel Calman.[2]

After his death in 1994, she lived for seven years with Hungarian painter Csaba Pásztor.

She currently lives in the Welsh border town of Presteigne with her husband since 2014, Mark Williams, a journalist, editor and magazine publisher. They also have a maisonette in Kentish Town, north London.

She has two adult children: Tom, a teacher, and Lottie, a journalist and novelist. In 1985, her mother was sent to prison for helping a terminally ill friend kill herself.[3] Moggach is a patron of Dignity in Dying and campaigns for a change in the law on assisted suicide.[4]

• Deborah Moggach at IMDb
• Author's website
• From Hampstead to Hollywood
• University of Bristol announcement about Moggach's receipt of honorary degree