Introduction

Dr Carol Peaker (DPhil, Oxon) has worked as a ghost-writer, editor, art critic, book reviewer, and university lecturer. In 2020-2022 she was a John Gray Visiting Scholar at the Oxford Centre for Life Writing, Wolfson College, University of Oxford. She is the author of Penguin Modern Painters, A History (2001) and editor of Don’t Enter the Wagons (2016). Her journalism has appeared in the Guardian, the National Post, Canadian Art, C magazine, and the Encyclopaedia Britannica Book of the Year. Carol has also written a novel for 8-12 year olds, several picture books, and translated Tolstoi’s stories for children.

Carol’s current project, The Baroness in the Acacia Tree, tells the story of Hungarian holocaust survivor Baroness Prof Eva Kohner, MBE.

Born and raised in Toronto, Carol has studied and lived in St Petersburg, London, and Oxford, where she now resides with her husband, two teenage boys, and a demented cockapoo. In her spare time, she organises community events, campaigns for nature, and is a compulsive doodler.