Gaynor Arnold was born and brought up in Cardiff, Wales. An only child, she grew up in a rented house with her parents (both shop assistants), grandparents and aunt. When she was 10 she asked her parents for a typewriter and proceeded to 'churn out three plays a week.' She turned to reading fiction following the death of her father when she was 11; it was then that she read David Copperfield for the first of many times.

Although both her parents left school at 14 years old, she stayed on, eventually winning a place to read English at St. Hilda's College, Oxford, where she acted in many plays, notably at the Edinburgh Festival and in a tour of the U.S. She describes her time at Oxford as "bliss" - it "was such a hedonistic experience that, when I left, I thought I really must do something with my life."

After two years of social work training she married her husband, Nicolas (who she met at Oxford, where he was studying history at Magdalen College). They moved to Exeter in the south of England, where she frequently visited some of the most deprived and dysfunctional households.

Over time she says the job became increasingly grueling. Speaking to the British Daily Telegraph she says, "I took some time out after having my second child, and when I came back to working with children in care, it got harder and harder. The types of problems became more severe, and the whole lid came off the sexual-abuse issue, which we naively thought hardly ever happened when I started out. All the child protection processes became more entrenched, and it became harder and harder to do the job."

Since 1996 Arnold, has worked for the Birmingham City Council as part of a recruitment team for adoption and fostering. She and Nicholas, a retired university lecturer, live in a large Victorian terraced house on the outskirts of the city. They have two adult children.

For almost 40 years, "jobs, children and life" got in the way of her writing. Then she joined a writers' group in the Nineties and rediscovered her love of writing.

Her first novel, Girl in a Blue Dress, was published in the UK in early 2009. The book was listed for both the Orange Prize for Fiction and the Man Booker prize. She also wrote Lying Together (2011), After Such Kindness (2012), and co-authored The Sea in Birmingham (2013).