Anne Atkins was brought up in Cambridge, where her father was head master of King’s College Choir School. She attended the Perse School for Girls (occasionally) while receiv-ing her education from Cambridge Footlights, spent her Gap year studying harp under So-lange Renie and attending the Decroux School of Mime in Paris, then directed the Clare College play in Cambridge, before going up to Brasenose College, Oxford - as her tutor astutely observed, to avoid reading for an English degree by spending her time in the Playhouse. She narrowly avoided collecting a degree by marrying Shaun Atkins immedi-ately after Finals (and contrary to the observation of an ASM while pinning Anne’s name on her dressing room door, this was not “an extraordinary coincidence”: she took his name on marriage, mainly because hers was even duller). She then trained at the Webber Doug-las Acadamy of Dramatic Art, before returning to Cambridge for Shaun to study for the An-glican ministry.
Her budding Shakespearean stage career curtailed by their copious breeding, Anne wrote her first book, Split Image: male and female after God’s likeness, over the course of sev-eral pregnancies, finally delivering their third child and her finished manuscript on consecu-tive days. Since then she has written three novels, The Lost Child, On Our Own, and A Fine and Private Place, and recently two more books of non-fiction, Child Rearing for Fun - trust your instincts and enjoy your children, and Agony Atkins, based on her popular and notorious agony aunt column in the Daily Telegraph. For several years she solved dilem-mas on ITV’s Sunday Morning and wrote on parenting issues first for femail.co.uk, and then weekly in the Daily Express. She can frequently be heard on radio and television, for instance on Radio 4’s Any Questions, BBC1’s Question Time and The Big Questions, and giving her popular and often controversial Thoughts for the Day on Radio 4’s Today Pro-gramme.
For many years Shaun was the Parson of Parsons Green, where Anne kept numerous dogs, cats, chickens, doves and bees, but sadly no horses, and where her hobbies largely seemed to be doing the school run and other people’s homework. Since then three of their children have returned to Cambridge to study, and a fourth is considering it.
Anne’s next book, The Other Side of the Moon, is an hilarious, moving and ultimately tri-umphant memoir detailing her family’s extraordinary experiences over the last decade, liv-ing with one offspring with Asperger syndrome, another with severe Obsessive Compul-sive Disorder, and finally a prolonged period of homelessness and abuse from her hus-band’s employer, the Church...

Novelist, agony aunt and highly respected journalist, Anne Atkins continues to juggle her successful career with running a large, busy family home. Her next book The Other Side of the Moon will be published later this year.