Lucy Ward

Lucy Ward is an author and journalist. She initially worked as an education correspondent for the Independent, before spending more than five years as a Lobby correspondent in the UK’s Houses of Parliament for the Guardian during Tony Blair’s premiership. After a stint living in Moscow reignited her passion for Russian history, she published her debut book The Empress and the English Doctor (Oneworld, 2022), which tells the story of Catherine the Great’s decision to summon the Quaker physician Thomas Dimsdale to St Petersburg to inoculate her and her son Paul against smallpox. The book was shortlisted for the Pushkin House Book Prize 2022. She holds an MA in Early and Middle English from the University of Oxford.