Vanessa de Haan is a writer, journalist, editor and proofreader. In 2005 she left The Spectator in London and moved to Devon. She took the MA in Creative Writing at Bath Spa University, and was a columnist on the Western Morning News.

Her first novel – THE RESTLESS SEA (HarperCollins, 2018) – is about the Merchant Navy and the Royal Navy during the Arctic convoys of the second world war, and was inspired by family history, as well as a love for the West Highlands of Scotland and the sea.

Her second novel – A TIME TO LIVE (HarperCollins, 2024) – is about duty and the legacy of war, and set on a crumbling estate in Devon between WW1 and WW2.

Vanessa is currently working on her third novel, a tale of anarchy on the England–Scotland border in the 1500s, in no way inspired by her life on the Devon–Somerset border in the Blackdown Hills, where she lives with a husband, three teenagers and various animals.