Catherine O'Flynn, born in 1970, is a British

United Kingdom

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...

 writer. Her novel, What Was Lost

What Was Lost

What Was Lost is the 2007 début novel by Catherine O'Flynn. The novel is about a girl who goes missing in a shopping centre in 1984, and the people who try to discover what happened to her twenty years later...

, won the prestigious First Novel prize at the Costa Book Awards

Costa Book Awards

The Costa Book Awards are a series of literary awards given to books by authors based in Great Britain and Ireland. They were known as the Whitbread Book Awards until 2005, after which Costa Coffee, a subsidiary of Whitbread, took over sponsorship....

 in 2008.

Biography

Prior to the publication of What Was Lost she worked in a variety of jobs including deputy manager of a large record shop, post woman, web editor, teacher and mystery shopper. After spending some time in and around Barcelona

Barcelona

Barcelona is the second largest city in Spain after Madrid, and the capital of Catalonia, with a population of 1,621,537 within its administrative limits on a land area of...

, she now lives and works in Birmingham

Birmingham

Birmingham is a city and metropolitan borough in the West Midlands of England. It is the most populous British city outside the capital London, with a population of 1,036,900 , and lies at the heart of the West Midlands conurbation, the second most populous urban area in the United Kingdom with a...

, England

England

England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

. She is married to Peter Fletcher, and they have one daughter.

Her first novel

Novel

A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....

, What Was Lost, was published in January 2007. This novel received critical acclaim as an examination of the often lackluster and empty experience of modern life, contrasted with the energy and optimism of a young girl who went missing in the mid-1980s. What Was Lost was long listed for the 2007 Man Booker Prize for Fiction and the Orange Prize for Fiction

Orange Prize for Fiction

The Orange Prize for Fiction is one of the United Kingdom's most prestigious literary prizes, annually awarded to a female author of any nationality for the best original full-length novel written in English, and published in the United Kingdom in the preceding year...

, and shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award

Guardian First Book Award

Guardian First Book Award, issued before 1999 as Guardian Fiction Prize or Guardian Fiction Award, is awarded to new writing in fiction and non-fiction.-History:...

. It won the Jelf Group First Novel Award at the Guildford Book Festival and the prestigious First Novel prize at the Costa Book Awards in January 2008. In April 2008 she was named Newcomer of the Year at the Galaxy British Book Awards.

Her second book, The News Where You Are was published on 1st July 2010 and launched the following day at Ikon Gallery in Birmingham http://www.ikon-gallery.co.uk/programme/current/event/405/book_launch_catherine_oflynn/