Clare Harvey is a British novelist whose historical fiction is particularly concerned with women’s experiences of war, military service and the pressures of the home front. Born in Devon, she spent part of her childhood in Mauritius and Surrey before studying Law at the University of Leicester. Rather than enter the legal profession, she worked in several countries as a journalist, teacher and charity worker, and later spent seventeen years as the wife of a serving British Army officer, as well as briefly serving in the Army Reserve herself. These experiences helped shape her interest in the often overlooked roles played by women during wartime. Harvey now lives in Nottingham with her family.
Harvey made her debut with The Gunner Girl, inspired in part by her mother-in-law’s Second World War experiences and written while her husband was serving in Afghanistan. The novel won the Exeter Novel Prize and the Romantic Novelists’ Association Joan Hessayon Award. Her subsequent historical novels include The English Agent, centred on women working with the Special Operations Executive in wartime France; The Night Raid, which explores women employed in British munitions factories and incorporates the real war artist Dame Laura Knight; and The Escape, which links the aftermath of the Second World War with Cold War Berlin. Across her novels Harvey combines carefully researched twentieth-century settings with stories of friendship, loyalty, secrecy and women whose contributions to war have often received less attention than those of front-line soldiers.
