Kate Summerscale is an English writer and journalist.

An Oxford graduate, she completed her MA in Journalism at Stanford, California. Summerscale is a former literary editor of the Daily Telegraph and has written articles for the Sunday Telegraph and the Guardian. She is the author of The Queen of Whale Cay, which won a Somerset Maugham Award in 1998. Her novel The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher was a number one bestseller in the UK and was been translated into more than a dozen languages, winning the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction in 2008 and at the British Book Awards, won for both Popular Non-Fiction and Book of the Year. She won the Edgar Award for Best Fact Crime for The Wicked Boy in 2017. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 20