Kate Figes was born in 1957 and graduated with a BA in Arabic and Russian from the Polytechnic of Central London. She worked for six years for the publishing house Pandora Press before moving to Cosmopolitan magazine where she is fiction editor. Her first book, Because of Her Sex - The Myth of Equality for Women in Britain, was published in 1994. She reviews fiction regularly for BBC Radio 4's Kaleidoscope.