Justin Cartwright was born in Cape Town, South Africa in 1945. He graduated from Trinity College, Oxford. Before becoming an author, he worked in advertising and in film and documentary directing. He wrote 13 novels including Interior, Look at It This Way, White Lightning, Half in Love, The Promise of Happiness, The Song Before It Is Sung, To Heaven by Water, Other People's Money, Lion Heart, and Up Against the Night. In Every Face I Meet won a Commonwealth Writers Prize and Leading the Cheers won the Whitbread Novel Award. He also wrote three non-fiction books entitled Not Yet Home, This Secret Garden, and Oxford Revisited. He died on December 3, 2018 at the age of 73.