Catherine Simpson was born and raised on a Lancashire dairy farm and moved to Edinburgh 30 years ago. In 2013, she won a Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award for her novel Truestory. Truestory was inspired by Catherine’s experiences raising her autistic daughter Nina. She and Nina now campaign for Autism Acceptance.

In 2016 Catherine received a Hawthornden Fellowship. Whilst there she began work on a memoir investigating the death by suicide of her sister, Tricia. The resulting When I Had a Little Sister was published by Fourth Estate.

Another volume of memoir, One Body, was published by Saraband. This explores how a cancer diagnosis made Catherine reassess her experience of living in a woman’s body and considers how our bodies tell the stories of our lives.

As a freelance journalist, her articles have appeared in, among others, The Scotsman, The Herald and The Telegraph.