Laura Thompson is an English writer and biographer. Her first book The Dogs: A Personal History of Greyhound Racing won the Somerset Maugham Award. She has also written acclaimed biographies of Nancy Mitford and Agatha Christie, and true-crime books on the disappearance of Lord Lucan and on the 1920s cause celebres Edith Thompson and Frederick Bywaters.
As a teenager, Thompson intended to go into theatre and attended Tring Park School for the Performing Arts, where she trained in dance. She went on to study English at Merton College, Oxford.