Katharine Quarmby biography
Katharine Quarmby is a writer, journalist and film-maker specialising in social affairs with an investigative edge. She has spent most of her working life as a journalist and has made many films for the BBC, as well as working as a correspondent for the Economist, contributing to British broadsheets, including the Guardian, Sunday Times and the Telegraph. She is now an associate editor at Prospect magazine, but also freelances regularly for other papers, including a stint providing roving political analysis for the Economist during the 2010 general election.
Katharine read Modern Languages at Cambridge University, then studied for a Masters in Latin American Studies at Liverpool University. She trained as a financial journalist at Euromoney, before leaving to work as a political researcher for the Labour front-bench in the House of Lords. She moved from there into television, and worked as an award-winning producer for her foreign and science films on BBC Newsnight and in current affairs, including for Panorama. Katharine left full-time TV in 2002, having had two children, and has worked in both TV and print ever since. She was longlisted for the Paul Foot prize in 2005 for Twizzlergate, her investigations into the scandal of English school food.
In the same year she was also short-listed for the Orange Prize for short story fiction, and published her first book for children, Fussy Freya, (Frances Lincoln) in 2008.
In 2007 Katharine started to investigate a number of violent killings of disabled men and women across the UK. As news editor of the disability magazine, Disability Now, she was able to put together the first national dossier of such crimes that year, following it up with a critically acclaimed report on disability hate crimes, Getting Away with Murder, for the charity Scope and the UK’s Disabled People’s Council.
Follow Katharine Quarmby on Twitter @katharineq
How I Found the Agency
I approached Andrew a few years ago when I was at the Economist to discuss a number of book ideas, and he was extremely helpful and informative, then, and has been ever since. I’m very pleased to be represented by him
