Gwendoline Riley is an English writer, born in 1979. Born in London, she attended Manchester Metropolitan University. Her first book, Cold Water, was named one of the five outstanding debut novels of 2002 by The Guardian 'Weekend' magazine and also won a Betty Trask Award. Sick Notes followed in 2004 and Joshua Spassky in 2007. For Cold Water and Sick Notes, the drama unfolds in Manchester, occasionally extending to different areas of Lancashire. Joshua Spassky, however, is set in Asheville, North Carolina - the town where Zelda Fitzgerald died in a fire at the Highland Hospital. Joshua Spassky won the 2008 Somerset Maugham Award and was shortlisted for the 2007 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. Riley was also a recipient of the Robert Louis Stevenson Fellowship in 2011. Her fourth novel, Opposed Positions, was published in May 2012. She lives in London with the poet Alan Jenkins. [More at Wikipedia]

January 1st, 1979 in London (Age 45)