Ophelia Field was born to American parents in Australia in 1971. She attended schools in Queensland and Sydney, before she and her mother, the writer and journalist Michele Field, emigrated to Britain.

Ophelia attended Westminster School from 1987 to 1989, after which she took a ‘gap year’ in South East Asia, where one of the places she worked was a Vietnamese refugee camp in Hong Kong. This job instilled a long-term interest in issues relating to refugees and human rights.

Ophelia read English at Christ Church, Oxford, graduating with a double first, and gained a Masters in Development Studies at the London School of Economics with distinction. She won the national T.E. Utley Prize in 1994.

Ophelia subsequently embarked on a career as a policy analyst and advocate in the refugee and human rights field, working at the European Council on Refugees and Exiles (ECRE) until 1998, then as an expert consultant to a range of human rights organisations, including Human Rights Watch (see her HRW reports entitled By Invitation Only and Stemming the Flow), the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (see her global study, Alternatives to Detention of Asylum Seekers and Refugees) and the New York Immigration Coalition.

Photo by Barney Cokeliss

Photos by Fran Monks
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At the same time, Ophelia wrote journalism and book reviews for The Sunday Telegraph, The Times Literary Supplement, The Literary Review and others. In 2000, she started to research and write The Favourite, a historical biography of Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, published in the United Kingdom by Hodder & Stoughton in August 2002 and in the United States by St Martin’s Press in July 2003. In 2003, Ophelia received the inaugural Elizabeth Longford Grant for the writing of historical biography, and was commissioned by HarperCollins to start work on her second book, The Kit-Cat Club. Research was completed in the UK and USA, to which she travels regularly.

Until spring 2008, Ophelia was Director of the Writers in Prison Programme of English PEN, the international writers’ association that campaigns for persecuted and imprisoned writers around the world.

Ophelia currently lives in London, with her partner and children, and is working on a number of new writing projects.