Alex McCarthy was born in Cardiff, half a mile from where she currently lives. An alumna of London Contemporary Dance School, she worked as a dancer and choreographer for a number of years on stage, TV and film. Alex began to write short stories in 2005 and was published (under the name Alexandra Claire) by Parthian, Honno and the Western Mail. In 2007, she received a New Writer's Award from Academi to write her first novel, Random Walk, published by Gomer Press in September 2011. Due to illness, Alex took a break from writing, only returning to the keyboard in 2017 to participate in a selective six-month Curtis Brown Creative course, 'How to Write a Novel'. Her breakthrough novella, The Unbroken Beauty of Rosalind Bone, was published on June 15^th 2023 by Doubleday. It has been selected as one of the i newspaper’s ‘Best Books out this June’ and described as “176 pages of quiet brilliance”. Translation rights have already been sold in Italy, Spain and Germany. The novel is also selected to our 2023 Bookshelf.