Rachel Billington is the author of twenty-five novels, six novels for children and nine non-fiction works including five religious books for children. Billington’s first novel, All Things Nice, appeared in 1969, her best-selling A Woman’s Age, in 1990, and Glory – A Story of Gallipoli in 2015. Her last novel, War Babies 2022, included scenes in Holloway Women’s prison and wartime Vietnam. She was one of the first women to be included in the BBC’s Plays for Today series and her play Don’t be Silly is credited for breaking new ground in tackling domestic violence. Her journalism included reviewing slots for the Financial Times and reviewer and travel write for the New York Times, columnist for the Daily Mail and the Sunday Telegraph. She became President of English PEN in 1998. Soon afterwards she started as a regular contributor to the prison newspaper Inside Time and has been Associate Editor there for over thirty years, which takes her into prisons round England. Billington is the fifth of the eight children of social reformer Lord Longford and biographer Elizabeth Longford. She married Film director Kevin Billington in 1967, becomgin a mother of four children and grandmother of seven.
In 2012 she was awarded an OBE for Services to Literature.
