Dorothy Leigh Sayers (13 June 1893 – 17 December 1957) was a renowned English crime writer, poet, playwright, essayist, translator, and Christian humanist. She was a student of classical and modern languages and is best known for her mysteries, a series of novels and short stories set between the First and Second World Wars, featuring the English aristocrat and amateur sleuth Lord Peter Wimsey.

Sayers was born in Oxford, raised in rural East Anglia, and educated at Godolphin School in Salisbury and Somerville College, Oxford, graduating with first-class honours in medieval French. Initially, she worked as an advertising copywriter and gained financial independence with the success of her first novel, Whose Body?, published in 1923. Between then and 1939, she wrote ten more novels featuring Lord Peter Wimsey.

She moved the genre of detective fiction away from pure puzzles into more character-driven narratives and became recognised as one of the 'Queens of Crime' of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction alongside Agatha Christie, Margery Allingham, and Ngaio Marsh. Sayers was a founder member of the Detection Club and collaborated on novels and radio serials.

From the mid‐1930s, Sayers wrote plays with religious themes, performed in English cathedrals and broadcast by the BBC. Her radio dramatization of Jesus's life, The Man Born to Be King, was controversial initially but quickly became recognized as significant. In the 1940s, her main focus was translating Dante's Divine Comedy into colloquial English, a work she considered her best.

She died unexpectedly at her home in Essex at the age of 64.