Katharine Whitehorn was a leading columnist on The Observer for over 30 years, and is currently Agony Aunt for Saga magazine for the over-50s. She was born in London, UK and educated at six schools, including the hyper-posh Roedean from which she ran away and Glasgow High School for Girls. After getting a degree in English from Newnham College, Cambridge she worked as a publisher's reader and ran a club for a year in Finland, going on to a postgraduate year at Cornell University, Ithaca.

Her first journalistic job was on Home Notes, a folksy little women's magazine; then Picture Post, where she met her husband, mystery writer Gavin Lyall, who died in 2003. When that folded she joined Woman's Own, and when she was fired from that, wrote a column for The Spectator until she joined the Observer, a prestigious London Sunday paper, in 1960.

She has been on the Board of the British Airports Authority and of Nationwide Building Society and has sat on numerous committees including the BBC's committee on the social effects of television, and Final Selection Boards for the Civil Service, and has been on the ethics committee of the Health and Safety Executive. She was a Vice President of the Patients Association for a dozen years and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine and was the first woman Rector of St Andrews University.

She has written various short books, including How to Survive Children, How to Survive in Hospital and a cookery book, Cooking in a Bedsitter, which became a classic and stayed in print for 40 years. She has two sons and a grandchild.