Deborah Moggach


Deborah Moggach is an English playwright, novelist and screenwriter. She has written nineteen novels, including The Ex-Wives, Tulip Fever, These Foolish Things and Heartbreak Hotel. Her film scripts include Pride and Prejudice.

Early life and career

Moggach is one of four daughters of writers Charlotte Hough and Richard Hough. Moggach was brought up in Bushey, Hertfordshire, and St John's Wood in London, and was educated at Camden School for Girls and Queen's College, London.
She graduated from the University of Bristol in 1971 with a degree in English, and then trained as a teacher before going to work at Oxford University Press. She lived in Pakistan for two years in the mid-1970s and in the United States.

Original works

Most of her novels are contemporary, tackling family life, divorce, children and the confusions and disappointments of relationships. She has an ear for comedy but has also written a dark thriller set in America, The Stand-In ; a bleak story of incest set near London Heathrow Airport, Porky ; and a novel pitting Muslim versus English family values, Stolen.
Her two historical novels are Tulip Fever, set in Vermeer’s Amsterdam, and In The Dark, set in a boarding house during the First World War. Her 2015 novel, Something to Hide, is set in Texas, London, Beijing, and West Africa. The Indian subcontinent has featured frequently in her work.
Her other work includes two collections of short stories and a stage play.

Adaptations for film and TV

By Moggach

She has adapted many of her novels as TV dramas.
She has written acclaimed adaptations of other people's work, including
Other writers have adapted novels by Moggach, including
  • These Foolish Things, her comic novel about elderly people moving to India to obtain affordable care, was made into the successful film The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel.
  • Tulip Fever was made into a film.

    Honours

In 2005, she was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Bristol; she is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a former Chair of the Society of Authors and was on the executive committee of English PEN. She was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire in the 2018 New Year Honours for services to literature.

Personal life

At Oxford University Press, she met the man who became her first husband, Tony Moggach; the couple later divorced. He died in November 2015.
For ten years, her partner was the cartoonist Mel Calman.
After Calman's death in 1994, she lived for seven years with Hungarian painter Csaba Pásztor.
From 2013-2021 she was married to Mark Williams, a journalist, editor and magazine publisher. They lived in the Welsh border town of Presteigne, and also had a maisonette in Kentish Town, north London.
As of 2024 Moggach had been single for three years.
She has two adult children: Tom, a teacher, and Lottie, a journalist and novelist.
In 1985, Moggach's mother was sent to prison for helping a terminally ill friend kill herself. Moggach is a patron of Dignity in Dying and campaigns for a change in the law on assisted suicide.

Habits

Moggach writes for 3 hours every morning, and smokes 3 roll-up cigarettes per day.

Works

Novels