Rachel Meller grew up near London, the middle daughter of Austrian Jewish refugees. After studying Neurobiology at the University of Sussex, and research into hormones and behaviour at Cambridge University, she became a medical writer in a local communication consultancy. She retired early to write her first book, The Box with the Sunflower Clasp, about her Viennese family’s escape from the Nazis to the unlikely haven of Shanghai. Published in May 2023, in June 2024 it was shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature’s Christopher Bland Prize.
Rachel’s fascination for the mysteries of clairvoyance, ghosts and brain function has led to her second nonfiction book (a work-in-progress), on a quite different topic: the nineteenth-century women involved in the early years of the Society for Psychical Research.
