Eleanor Updale was born in London.  She studied History at St Anne’s College, Oxford, later gaining a PhD at the University of London. She was a News and Current Affairs producer at the BBC from 1975 to 1990.  She has been writing fiction since the beginning of this century.  Her books have been translated into several languages, and the Montmorency series has won awards on both sides of the Atlantic.

Eleanor is a lay member, and past Vice Chair, of the Clinical Ethics Committee at Great Ormond Street Hospital, and is a member of the UK Donation Ethics Committee.  She is on the editorial advisory board of the Royal Society of Medicine’s journal Clinical Ethics. She is also a governor of the children’s charity Coram, an ambassador for the Prince’s Foundation for Children and the Arts, and a trustee of the disability charity, Listening Books.
 
As a Fellow of the Royal Literary Fund she is based at Queen Mary, University of London, where she gives one-to-one tutorials to people from all subjects, and at all levels, advising them about their academic writing.

Eleanor lives in Richmond, Surrey, and has three children in their late teens and early twenties.