Andrea Stuart was born and raised in the Caribbean. She studied English at the University of East Anglia and French at the Sorbonne. Her first book, Showgirls, was published by Jonathan Cape in 1996.It was adapted into a two-part documentary for the Discovery Channel in 1998 and has since inspired a theatrical show, a contemporary dance piece and a number of burlesque performances. Her second book, The Rose of Martinique: A Biography of Napoleon’s Josephine, was published by Macmillan in 2003. It has subsequently been published in the US by Grove Press (2004), in Germany by Karl Blessing Verlag (2004), in France by Perrin (2006) and in Sweden by Prisma (2006). The Rose of Martinique won the Enid McLeod Literary Prize in 2004. Her third book, Sugar in the Blood: One Family’s Story of Slavery and Empire, was published in England (2012) by Portobello Books and in the US by Knopf in 2013. It was shortlisted for the BOCAS Literary Prize and the Spears Book Award. And was the Boston Globe’s non-fiction pick of 2013. The essay 'Tourist', a meditation on female sexuality was published in Granta Magazine’s autumn 2014 issue, and her essay 'Travels in Pornland' was published by Granta in 2017. She has been published in numerous anthologies and her articles have been published in a range of newspapers and magazines.