Susanna Clarke is an English author celebrated for her debut novel Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (2004), a Hugo Award-winning alternative history. Clarke started working on the novel in 1993 and dedicated her spare time to it for the following decade. Her manuscript was acquired by Bloomsbury in 2003, leading to its successful publication.

In 2006, Clarke released The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories, a collection of short stories set in the same magical version of England as her debut novel. Her writing is characterized by a pastiche of 19th-century literary styles, reminiscent of authors like Jane Austen and Charles Dickens. While Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell focuses on two male magicians, her short stories in The Ladies of Grace Adieu explore the empowerment of women through magic.

Clarke's literary prowess continued with her second novel, Piranesi, which was published in September 2020 and won the 2021 Women's Prize for Fiction. Her early life was nomadic, with time spent across Northern England and Scotland, and she pursued education at St Hilda's College, Oxford. Clarke has a background in non-fiction publishing and has also spent time teaching English in both Turin and Bilbao before returning to England in 1992, where she worked as an editor at Simon and Schuster's Cambridge office.