Stephanie Williams

I am a Canadian, a wife of fifty+ years, mother of two and grandmother of six.

But the way I am defined as a woman was formed at my alma-mater, Wellesley College, and the violent upheavals to America’s way of life brought on by the late 1960s.

'The Education of Girls', my latest book, tells the story of me and my four closest friends during this tumultuous time. For it was tumultuous, with events turning and twisting every day. Not so unlike the times we find ourselves in today.

As for my backstory, my mother was born in China in 1925, to an Englishman and a young Russian refugee who had escaped the brutality of the Bolshevik revolution. I grew up moving constantly across Canada, Europe and the United States, before taking a degree in history at Wellesley College, Massachusetts and becoming a London-based journalist. Out of a three-year stay in Hong Kong, came my commission to write 'Hongkong Bank', the story of the building of Norman Foster’s masterpiece for the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation. This was followed by 'Docklands' in 1993. By this time, perestroika had come to Russia and it was possible to begin to investigate the truth of my Russian grandmother’s past. Researching and writing 'Olga’s Story' took ten years. 'Running the Show: Governors of the British Empire', is the result of an accidental discovery: an unknown file in Britain’s National Archives, an 1879 survey of how Queen Victoria’s governors were living around the empire.