AL Kennedy is a Scottish-born writer and performer, now living in Essex. Among her other distinctions she was the recipient of a Lannan Award, the Costa Prize, The Heinrich Heine Preis, the Somerset Maugham Award, the John Llewellyn Rees Prize the 2020 Austrian Booksellers’ Award for Tolerance in Thought and Action. She has twice been included on the Granta Best of Young British Novelists list.