Christie Watson

Christie Watson (born 1976) is a British novelist whose novel Tiny Sunbirds Far Away won the Costa First Novel Award in the 2011 Costa Book Awards. Her second novel Where Women Are Kings also won critical praise and has been widely translated.

Born in Stevenage, she left school at the age of 16 and after volunteering for a year at Scope (then the Spastics Society) went into nursing. She trained at Great Ormond Street Hospital and worked for many years as a children's nurse before she began writing and combined the two professions. She won the Malcolm Bradbury Bursary, which enabled her to take an MA in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia, from where she graduated in 2009. Christie currently works as Programme Director for BA and MA Creative Writing at St Mary's University. She lives in London with her two children.