Judy Golding was born in Marlborough, Wiltshire, in 1945 and grew up near Salisbury, where her parents worked as teachers. She read English at the University of Sussex and St Anne’s College, Oxford, and in 1971 she married an American studying politics at Balliol. Subsequently, she worked as a copy editor for Oxford University Press and Jonathan Cape. She and her husband have three sons and three grandchildren and live in Bristol.