Born in Poland, Lisa Appignanesi grew up in Paris and then in the province of Quebec - first in a small Laurentian town, subsequently in Montreal. She attended McGill University, where she wrote for and was Features Editor of the McGill Daily; spent a summer working for the Canadian Press, another doubling as a waitress and student at the Sorbonne. A Bachelor's degree in Honours English was followed by a Masters which included a thesis on Edgar Allen Poe. During that last year at McGill, she also taught at Loyola College.

Wooed to Britain in 1967 by what appeared in Canadian newspapers as a London buzzing with the new, she did a D Phil in Comparative Literature at the University of Sussex, spent a year in Vienna and Paris and wrote a thesis on Henry James, Proust, and Robert Musil which was later published.

After this, academic work didn't immediately beckon. First in 1970 came a year as a staff writer in a social research firm in Manhattan. The work grew into a co-authored book on the counter-culture. 1971 saw her back in Britain lecturing in European Studies at the University of Essex, and some years later at New England College. During the second half of the Seventies, she became one of the founding members of the publishing cooperative, Writers and Readers - which included such luminaries as John Berger, Arnold Wesker and the young Irish writer, soon to be filmmaker, Neil Jordan; and originated the comic strip documentary series, Beginners Books, now relaunched by IKON as INTRODUCING....

The beginning of the Eighties found her at London's Institute of Contemporary Arts, an edgy cultural centre which crosses all the art forms. In Appignanesi's time as Director of Talks and later Deputy Director of the ICA, she made the ICA a leading international player in the world of ideas, a multi-discplinary and radical, 'theoretical' talk shop. She initiated an exciting literature programme, discussion series, publications and conferences on everything from philosophy to art and advertising, politics to popular culture. She also set up ICA-Television and acted as executive producer on a number of made for TV documentaries and dramas, including England's Henry Moore and Seductions. The mid-eighties also found her doubling up as Director of the Greater London Council Enterprise Board's cultural programme, a launch pad for thinking about and supporting the 'cultural industries'.

In 1990, she left the ICA in order to take up the challenge of writing full-time. She had two contracts in hand - one for a saga which became the best-selling Memory and Desire; another for a ground-breaking historical study, Freud's Women, co-authored with her partner, John Forrester. Radically different though they are on the surface, these books underline Appignanesi's interest in finding ways of marrying popular and high culture and writing across the divide.
Nine novels, several of them bestsellers and two works of highly-acclaimed non-fiction. followed. Restless with genre and branding, Appignanesi's fiction has moved across them - romance, saga, mystery, the historical novel, a comedy in letters, a novel of return. She has also made several television films, including a film for French television on Salman Rushdie. She has presented and scripted various radio programmes and series, such as The Case of Sigmund Freud for BBC Radio 4, as well as presenting Night Waves for Radio 3. She has appeared as a commentator on television and radio, contributed to New Writing, and written reviews and features for various newspapers, including The Independent, The Guardian, The Observer and The Telegraph. She has given guest lectures, taught writing workshops and served on the Management Committee of the Society of Authors, and the PEN Writers in Prison Committee, as well as on the Council of the Institute of Contemporary Arts. In researching The Memory Man, she became a Fellow of the Brain and Behaviour Laboratory at the Open University and shadowed Professor Steven Rose's group which works on memory, a subject which long fascinated her and is also at the centre of her family memoir, Losing the Dead. She is currently working on a book on women and the mind doctors.

A Chevalier de l'ordre des arts et des lettres, Lisa Appignanesi became Deputy President of English PEN in 2004 and has led its highly successful Free Expression is No Offence campaign. She is also on the board of the Freud Museum.

She has two children, the film-maker Josh Appignanesi, and, now at the University of Cambridge, Katrina Forrester.