Xandra Bingley started work at the age of seventeen for MI5. On moving to the US, she worked at the Buffalo University Poetry Library, annotating Dylan Thomas and Pamela Hansford-Johnson's love letters; at The Atlantic Monthly Review in Boston as a reader, and at the Kennedy Institute of Politics at Harvard, as assistant to the Director. Subsequently in London she worked at The New Review literary magazine, then became a publisher's reader and then a commissioning editor at Jonathan Cape before she started her own literary agency, which she ran for 15 years, representing Ali Smith, Esther Freud, Geoff Dyer and Alasdair Gray, amongst many others. Her childhood wartime memoir Bertie, May and Mrs Fish was published in the UK to great acclaim in 2005. She lives in London, NW3.