Anna Lyndsey worked for several years as a UK civil servant in Whitehall until she became ill with extreme light sensitivity. She started writing to stop her brain exploding from boredom, and her book Girl in the Dark was published by Bloomsbury in 2015, translated into several languages and chosen as a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week.

Like many people who suffer from chronic illness, Anna Lyndsey found her physical condition frequently dismissed as “all in the mind”, despite clear evidence that it wasn’t. She has become fascinated by the way establishments of all kinds – corporate, political, scientific – react to new uncomfortable truths, and how often they reach for “psychological” labels to keep those truths at bay. This is the subject of her first novel, Impossible People.