Steve Davies is a literary critic, novelist, historian and biographer. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1998, and now works as the Royal Literary Fund Writing Fellow at the University of Wales in Swansea, her home town. She taught English Literature at Manchester University before becoming a full-time author in 1984. She has written four distinguished books on Emily Bronte and edited Anne Bronte's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall for Penguin Classics. Her history of the seventeenth century, A Century of Troubles (2001), accompanied a Channel 4 TV series. Stevie Davies' first novel, Boy Blue, won the Fawcett Prize in 1989 and her latest novel, The Element of Water (Women's Press, 2001) was longlisted for the Booker Prize.