Kate Moore is the author of The Radium Girls, the first-ever narrative non-fiction

account of this inspirational true story.

 

Kate was born in Northampton, England and grew up in Peterborough. She

studied English Literature at the University of Warwick. A Sunday Times

bestselling author, she writes across various genres, from biography and history

to gift and humour, and is also in demand as a book editor and ghostwriter.

Before becoming a full-time author and freelance editor, she was an editorial

director at Penguin Random House UK.

 

Kate is also an actress – her roles include Fabiana Aziza Cunningham in The Last

Days of Judas Iscariot, Beatrice-Joanna in The Changeling and Paulina in The

Winter’s Tale – and theatre director, who was a former member of the National

Student Theatre Company, where she won acclaim from The Sunday Times for

co-devising and performing in Insomnia, ‘the best dance I have ever seen from a

student company’.

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Kate first discovered the story of the radium girls when she directed the play

These Shining Lives by Melanie Marnich, which dramatises the experiences of

the Ottawa dial-painters; this production played in two theatres in London in

2015, including a transfer to the Pleasance, and won critical acclaim. While

conducting research for the play, she realised there was no book that focused on the women and told their story in their own words. Feeling passionately that the women deserved such a book, she decided to write it.

 

Kate’s research took her all over America – to Newark and Orange, New Jersey; to New York and Washington, DC; and to Chicago and Ottawa, Illinois. She walked in the women’s footsteps and met their families; visited their homes and graves; stood in the lobby of Grossman’s office and at the sites of the dial-painting studios, and remembered the radium girls. She hopes, through her book, that you will do the same.

 

Kate lives near Cambridge, England.