Lucy Mangan is a journalist and columnist. She was educated in Catford and Cambridge. She studied English at the latter and then spent two years training as a solicitor, but left as soon as she qualified and went to work much more happily in a bookshop instead. She got a work experience placement at the Guardian in 2003 and hung around until they gave her a job. Lucy now writes a regular columns for the newspaper as well as features and TV reviews there. She has written for most of the major women's magazines, including Grazia, Marie Claire and Cosmopolitan and now has a weekly column in Stylist magazine. She was named Columnist of the Year at the 2013 Professional Publishers' Association awards. In 2009, a collection of her columns from the Guardian was published as a book entitled My Family and Other Disasters. Her other works include Hopscotch and Handbags: The Essential Guide to Being a Girl, a book about the experience of growing up in 80s suburbia, and The Reluctant Bride which is the lightly-fictionalised story of her wedding. Lucy has just finished writing a history of Charlie And The Chocolate Factory for Puffin Books, and is now working on Bookworm, a personal history and celebration of children's literature for Square Peg (Random House). She lives in south-east London with one husband, one son, two cats and fourteen double-stacked Billy bookcases.