Prue Leith has lived a lively life in all respects. She has had successful careers in food; with cookbooks, journalism, the restaurant and catering world, with her chef schools as a TV presenter and Great British Bake Off judge. But she’s also had a fascinating private life, adopting a Cambodian war orphan, falling in love with three amazing men, and, as she puts it, ‘being bossy and interfering in everything’.
Prue Leith has always been simultaneously a writer and a cook. Before she started writing fiction, she had a successful career in journalism with columns in the Daily Mail, Sunday Express, Guardian and Mirror and wrote twelve cookbooks, with Leith's Cookery Bible (co-written with Caroline Waldegrave) still regularly updated and in print. She is a familiar face on British television (The Great British Menu, My Kitchen Rules UK and The Great British Bake Off), but from the age of 20 to 50 her main career was in business, with a Michelin starred restaurant in Notting Hill Gate, a catering company that fed the passengers on the Orient Express Train and delegates in major conference centres all over the UK. Her catering company held the catering contracts for city companies like JP Morgan and Freshfields, the Royal parks and Hampton Court Palace. Her party catering company catered for the likes of Elton John and summer weekends would be taken up with weddings. She won Businesswoman of the Year in 1990.
In 1993 she sold her business and gave up food writing to concentrate on fiction. Since then she has written eight novels, all of them stories of family life, love, ambition and business, and most of them containing a good helping of food! Her memoir Relish came out in 2012 and was updated in 2017. Her latest novel, The Lost Son is the third book of a trilogy of novels set in the food business. The first book, The House of Chorlton, is set in and after WW2 with austerity and rationing; the second, The Prodigal Daughter, is set in the sixties and seventies with nouvelle cuisine and the explosion of restaurants in the UK, and this last book will take us to telly chefs, organics and the horrors of junk food. She is published by Quercus. The trilogy is currently in development as a TV series.
After 25 years, Prue wrote a new cookery book called PRUE, which was published by Bluebird in 2018.
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