She is the author of Haweswater, which won the 2003 Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Novel, a Society of Authors Betty Trask Award and a Lakeland Book of the Year prize. In 2004, her second novel, The Electric Michelangelo, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, the Commonwealth Writers Prize (Eurasia region) and the Prix Femina Étranger, and was longlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction. Her third novel, The Carhullan Army, was published in 2007 and won the 2006/07 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, the James Tiptree, Jr. Award, a Lakeland Book of the Year prize, was shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award for science fiction and longlisted for the IMPAC Dublin Award. The Carhullan Army was listed as one of The Times 100 Best Books of the Decade. Her fourth novel, How to Paint a Dead Man, was published in 2009 and was longlisted for the Man Booker prize and won the Portico Prize for Fiction 2010. Her work has been translated into more than a dozen languages. Her first collection of short stories, The Beautiful Indifference, was published by HarperCollins in 2013.
