British · b. 1980
Francesca Segal is a British novelist and journalist. She was born in 1980 in London and studied at Oxford before working as a journalist. Her debut novel, The Innocents (2012), is a modern retelling of Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence, set in a close-knit Jewish community in north-west London. It won the Costa First Novel Award and the National Jewish Book Award. Her second novel, The Awkward Age (2017), follows a blended family and the strains between a mother, her teenage daughter and a new partner. She has also written a memoir, Mother Ship (2017), about the premature birth of her twin daughters and their time in neonatal intensive care. Segal has written for The Guardian, The Times and The New York Times. Her Tuga Island Trilogy, beginning with Welcome to Glorious Tuga, moves into lighter, escapist fiction set on a remote fictional island.