Alison Jean Lester was born to a British mother and an American father, who met on an airplane when she was a Pan Am stewardess and he was coming back from participating in the first American expedition to Mount Everest. She has variously studied, worked, and raised children in the US, the UK, China, Italy, Taiwan, Japan and Singapore, and now lives in England with her husband and their miniature schnauzer. Her first novel, Lillian on Life, was published in 2015, and her second, Yuki Means Happiness, came out in July 2017. Her memoir of her mother's amazing approach to the end of her life, Absolutely Delicious: A Chronicle of Extraordinary Dying, was published on 22 October, 2020.