Daisy Goodwin

Daisy Georgia Goodwin (born 19 December 1961) is an English screenwriter, TV producer and novelist. She is the creator of the ITV/ PBS show Victoria which has sold to 146 countries. She has written four novels: My Last Duchess, The American Heiress, The Fortune Hunter, and Victoria; all of which have been New York Times bestsellers and have been translated into more than ten languages. She has also curated eight poetry anthologies, including 101 Poems That Could Save Your Life. Goodwin spent twenty-five years working as a TV producer, where she created and produced shows like Grand Designs which has now been on Channel 4 for more than twenty years, and Escape to the Country which is in its twentieth year on BBC2. Early life Goodwin was born and raised in London. She is the daughter of the film producer Richard B. Goodwin and the interior decorator Jocasta Innes. Her parents separated when she was five and then divorced. She is of Irish and Argentinian ancestry. In a 2019 interview by Rachel Ward of The Daily Telegraph she said: "I grew up surrounded by creative people" - she would return home "to find Lauren Bacall and Ingrid Bergman sat on the sofa having tea". Her great-great-great-grandfather was Irish clergyman Robert Traill, whose character she included in an episode of the second season of her TV drama Victoria which addressed the Irish famine in the 1840s. Traill was played by Martin Compston. Career After attending Queen's College, London and Westminster School, Goodwin studied history at Trinity College, Cambridge. She attended Columbia Film School as a Harkness Scholar and then, in 1985, joined the BBC as a trainee. In 1998, Goodwin moved to Talkback Productions as head of factual programmes, becoming editorial director by 2003. In 2005, Goodwin founded Silver River Productions, which was sold to Sony in 2011. Her first novel, My Last Duchess, was published in the UK in August 2010 and, under the title The American Heiress, in the U.S. and Canada in June 2011. Goodwin has also compiled multiple poetry anthologies, the first being The Nation's Favourite Love Poems in 1997, and written a memoir entitled Silver River (2007). She was chairman of the judges for the 2010 Orange Prize for women's fiction, and commented in a New Statesman interview that "a recommendation from a woman is more interesting to me than what a man might tell me to read".