Laura Gascoigne has worked as an art journalist for over twenty years, editing Artists & Illustrators (1994-1999) before going freelance. Born in Cairo in 1950, the daughter of a bookseller and an Italian teacher, she grew up in Brussels and Cambridge before studying Classics at Oxford University. Her sister is the writer Marina Warner. Surrounded as a child by the paintings her father collected, Laura has always had a passion for art and when not writing about it, she paints.