Margot Livesey is a Scottish novelist and short story writer. She was born in Edinburgh in 1955 and studied English at the University of York. Her first novel, Homework, was published in 1985 and was followed by a number of critically acclaimed works, including Criminals, Eva Moves the Furniture, The Missing World, and The House on Fortune Street. Livesey has also written several short story collections, including Learning by Heart and The Boy and the Sea. Her work has been translated into several languages and has won numerous awards, including the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Orange Prize for Fiction. Livesey currently lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she teaches creative writing at Harvard University.