British Library · CC BY 3.0

A former literary editor at The Sunday Times who reinvented food writing as a genre worth taking seriously: How to Eat (1998) sold 300,000 copies and became a bestseller on the strength of its prose as much as its recipes. She went on to host Nigella Bites and several other BBC and Food Network series, winning a Guild of Food Writers Award, and has sold more than eight million cookery books worldwide.