Margaret Forster (born May 25, 1938) is a British author. She was born in Carlisle, Englan, where she attended Carlisle and County High School for Girls (1949-1956), and then won an Open Scholarship to read modern history at Somerville College, Oxford, from where she graduated in 1960. After a short period as a teacher at Barnsbury Girls' School in Islington, north London (1961-1963), she has worked as a novelist, biographer and freelance literary critic, contributing regularly to book programmes on television, to BBC Radio 4 and various newspapers and magazines. She was a member of the BBC Advisory Committee on the Social Effects of Television (1975-1977),the Arts Council Literary Panel (1978-1981), and chief reviewer for non-fiction in the Evening Standard (1977-1980). She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1975.