After an early career as a BBC World Service Radio producer, Lydia Syson turned from the spoken to the written word, and developed an enduring obsession with history. Her PhD about poets, explorers and Timbuktu was followed by a biography of Britain’s first fertility guru, DOCTOR OF LOVE: JAMES GRAHAM AND HIS CELESTIAL BED, and then two YA novels for Hot Key Books set in the Spanish Civil War (A WORLD BETWEEN US) and World War Two (THAT BURNING SUMMER). LIBERTY’S FIRE, a passionate tale of the Paris Commune of 1871, is the third of her novels to be inspired, very loosely, by family history. Her much praised adult fiction debut, MR PEACOCK'S POSSESSIONS, a sophisticated 'Robinsonade' for the twenty-first century set on a remote Pacific island, is now out in paperback.

Lydia Syson is a fifth-generation North Londoner who now lives south of the river with her partner and four children.