Dr Gwen Adshead has worked as a forensic psychiatrist and psychotherapist in the NHS for nearly three decades. She spent most of her career as a consultant at Broadmoor Hospital, a high-security psychiatric facility in the south of England, where she treated people referred to by the media as "the violent insane,” but whom she described as "not mad or bad, but sad.”

Understanding and treating the psychological mechanisms that give rise to violence and life-threatening behavior towards others has been the focus of Gwen’s career. It is her guiding belief as a practitioner, writer and advocate that the most vilified and socially rejected members of society need and deserve psychiatric care and rehabilitation.

Since qualifying in medicine in 1983, Gwen trained in general psychiatry, then in forensic psychiatry and psychotherapy. She is a qualified member of the Institute for Group Analysis and has also gained two Masters Degrees and an honorary doctorate. She regularly gives lectures, both nationally and internationally, including recent professorships at the Yale School of Law and Psychiatry and at Gresham College. In 2013, she was honored with the President’s Medial by the Royal College of Psychiatry.

Gwen was the castaway on Desert Island Discs on 1 July 2010, and has been a guest on several other BBC Radio 4 programmes including Start the Week, In Our Time and The Life Scientific. Born in Christchurch, New Zealand, Gwen now lives near London.

Before dedicating herself to writing, Eileen Horne worked for twenty years as an independent TV drama producer under her former surname of QUINN. During that time, she founded her own production company in London, developed and made over a hundred hours of primetime network drama for the UK and international market, and in 2004, she collaborated with a fellow producer on her first book, THE PITCH, an engaging “how to” book about selling creative ideas.

Eileen went on to gain an MA in Creative and Life Writing from Goldsmiths College, where she pursued her interest in recounting stories of people who have been forgotten or marginalized. In 2015, she published her second book ZOLA AND THE VICTORIANS, a narrative non-fiction account of a draconian censorship trial in Britain.

She has since authored and adapted numerous BBC radio dramas, and is currently contributing to THIS THING OF DARKNESS, a drama series and podcast for BBC Radio 4 which she co-created, featuring the adventures of a fictional female forensic psychiatrist.

Formerly based in England, Eileen now lives between California and Italy. She is married with one daughter.