Rachel Roddy was born in Southampton in 1972 but grew up near London. She trained at Drama Center London, then moved to Rome in 2005, where she began writing, mostly about food, on her blog Racheleats. Her first book, Five Quarters was published in 2015 and won the André Simon Memorial Fund food book Award and The Guild of Food writers First Book Award. Her second book Two Kitchens was published in 2017 and her third, An A to Z of pasta will be published in July 2021. She has written for The Financial Times, Noble Rot, Vanity Fair, National Geographic and Eater, and has a weekly column in The Guardian called A Kitchen in Rome. She lives in Rome with her Sicilian partner and son.