Christobel Kent was born in London in 1962, and educated at state schools in Essex and then at Trinity Hall college, Cambridge. She was a relatively late starter as a novelist, starting to write aged 39 when her youngest child began at nursery: her first novel, A Party in San Niccolo, inspired by the years she spent living in Florence with her family, was published by Penguin/Michael Joseph the following year.
In the subsequent two decades, Christobel has had seventeen novels published, ten of them set in Italy, including the six volume Sandro Cellini detective series. Of her English-set standalone domestic noir psychological thrillers, The Loving Husband (Sphere, 2016) was a Richard and Judy selection that sold almost 200,000 copies across various media, and What We Did (Sphere 2018) was shortlisted for the Crime Writers’ Association’s Gold Dagger Award.
She has taught workshops on creative writing for the Bland Badger creative retreats in Umbria and delivered a masterclass on setting in fiction for the Sunday Times. She reviews fiction regularly for the Guardian newspaper and has also written for the Financial Times, the Daily Mail, and the Telegraph and had regular columns in The Amorist and Perspective magazines.
She divides her time between Cambridge, UK, and Florence, Italy and is happy to mentor in and from either location.
