Annabel Kantaria is a British journalist currently working as The Telegraph’s Dubai-based “Expat” blogger. In 2013, she won the inaugural Montegrappa Prize for First Fiction at the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature. Her work caught the critical eye of top London agent Luigi Bonomi and Annabel went on to secure a three-book contract with Harlequin’s MIRA. Her debut novel, Coming Home (MIRA, May 2015), is the reworked version of the prize-winning manuscript. Annabel studied psychology at Warwick University, graduating in 1992 with a BSc Hons degree. She liked the idea of becoming a psychologist but the call from the written word was louder. She spent six years working in publishing in London, first at Franklin Watts and then at Dorling Kindersley, before marrying her university sweetheart and moving to Dubai with him in 1998. In the early days in Dubai, Annabel worked as a freelance journalist and a radio producer before bagging her dream job as editor of the region’s leading woman’s magazine, Emirates Woman. In 2007, Annabel left office life to work as a freelance journalist while following her dream of writing fiction. She has written prolifically for publications in the UK and across the Middle East and currently juggles her fiction-writing with her work for The Telegraph while bringing up her children. Novels remain Annabel’s passion: she drafts her manuscripts not only every moment she’s awake, but often in her sleep as well.

Annabel Kantaria also writes under the name Anna Kent