Emma was born and brought up in London, the middle of three sisters. Her mother is an English teacher, and her father was a lawyer in the Foreign Office, so they also spent three years in Manhattan and another three commuting between London and Brussels. Perhaps inevitably, in Emma' s memory, supper table arguments were usually about words: their exact meaning, ambiguities, overtones, etymology and changing use. Driving across the USA in a camper van, their father retold the stories of the Greek myths, and their mother read them Edward Lear, The Princess and the Goblin and Noel Streatfeild. Later, in airports and on cross-channel ferries, it was Shakespeare, Kidnapped and Jane Austen.

The family spent many holidays on the Essex/Suffolk border, where much of The Mathematics of Love is set, and from Brussels they travelled around Europe. Other memories have shaped the novel too: the battlefield of Waterloo, and the road from San Sebastian to Bilbao. They were even once caught by the Guardia Civil when they set up camp by mistake on General Franco's country estate. A Secret Alchemy has many of its roots in Emma’s London childhood: films like Olivier’s Richard III, visits to the Tower of London and Westminster Abbey, memories of Josephine Tey's detective story The Daughter of Time, and always the layers of history that underlie everything, and show wherever the modern surface cracks.

Emma liked writing stories as a child, but history was her passion. She read Geoffrey Trease, Cynthia Harnett, Barbara Willard, and time-slip novels like Penelope Farmer's frightening Charlotte Sometimes. She moved on to Hornblower, Heyer and Mary Renault, but as a teenager caught the theatre bug and went up to the University of Birmingham to read Drama. To this day Emma says that she uses what she learnt of characterisation, subtext and stagecraft in her own writing, but she also worked through her stage-struckness and out the other side. Her Finals dissertation was on play publishing; realising that the book industry was a place where she felt at home, she spent some years in academic publishing, and it was only when she had two small children that she started writing again. Then she was diverted: her first camera had been a tenth birthday present, and now she finally acquired a darkroom.

But Emma became more and more sure that writing is what matters to her, and she got a place on the MPhil in Writing at the University of Glamorgan, where her tutor was novelist and poet Christopher Meredith. By that time she had discovered Peter Ackroyd, Allan Massie, Rose Tremain and A. S. Byatt. Historical fiction for adults had become what it has always been for children: a unique space where serious writers can explore fundamental desires and fears, while revelling in the nearness and otherness of worlds that we know were here, but can' t quite see. The novel she wrote for the degree became The Mathematics of Love.

Emma graduated from the MPhil just as The Mathematics of Love was being sold to Headline Review and then to Morrow in the US. She found the form of a practice-led research degree so fruitful that she decided to study for a doctorate at Goldsmiths, where her supervisor was Maura Dooley. The Mathematics of Love was published in 2006; The Times described it as “that rare thing, a book that works on every conceivable level. A real achievement”, and the Daily Express as, “an addictive, engaging foray into historical fiction that leaves the reader believing in the art of perspective and the redemptive power of love.” The Mathematics of Love was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers and Goss First Novel awards, longlisted for the Prince Maurice Prize and the RNA Novel of the Year, and translated into many languages.

Emma’s second novel A Secret Alchemy was published by Headline Review in 2008 and by Harper Perennial in the following year. It reached the Sunday Times Bestsellers Lists in 2009, and was named as one of The Times Top 50 Paperbacks of 2009. The Daily Mail called it “powerful and convincing”, and the Times “spellbinding”. It also formed the major part of her doctorate, which explores historical fiction as a genre and Creative Writing as a subject; Emma is the first writer to be awarded a PhD in Creative Writing by Goldsmiths. She is now working on her third novel.

As well as writing novels, Emma writes short fiction, and has had her stories published and broadcast. She has appeared at literary festivals from Hay on Wye to New Zealand, and she teaches, lectures and blogs. She is an associate lecturer at the Open University, teaching creative writing. Emma now lives with her children in South East London, still surrounded by history: there was a Viking fort on the hill behind their house, and down the road is Eltham Palace, where many important scenes in A Secret Alchemy are set. No further away is William Morris’s Red House, which inspired the Chantry and the Pryor family in the novel, and Down House, home of Charles Darwin and his cousin and wife Emma Wedgwood: Emma’s great-great-grandparents.