Deborah Lawrenson spent her childhood moving around the world with diplomatic service parents, from Kuwait to China, Belgium, Luxembourg and Singapore. She read English at Cambridge University and then worked as a journalist in London. She is the author of eight novels and her writing is praised for its vivid sense of place.

The Art of Falling was a WHSmith Fresh Talent pick in 2005. The Lantern was published to critical acclaim in the USA, chosen for the Channel4 TV Book Club in the UK and shortlisted for Romantic Novel of the Year 2012 in the Epic category. The Sea Garden (2014) is a novel in three novellas set in Provence and London; one of these novellas features the character of Marthe Lincel the perfume maker from The Lantern and the story is based on several true events of wartime resistance in the South of France.

She divides her time between rural Kent and a crumbling hamlet in Provence, the atmospheric setting for The Lantern. Her most recent novel is 300 Days of Sun, which is set in Portugal and has been selected as a Great Group Read for the WNBA National Reading Group Month in October 2016 in the USA.