Sarah Bakewell

Bakewell published At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails in 2016, a biography of the existentialist movement and its leaders Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Albert Camus. Bakewell was drawn to the existentialist movement at a young age; at age 16, she used some of her birthday money to buy a copy of Sartre's Nausea (1938). Bakewell inserted this personal angle into the work; The New York Times critic Janet Maslin wrote, "As someone who came back to this material by rereading it later in life, she has made her responses part of the story." At the Existentialist Café was named one of the Ten Best Books of 2016 by The New York Times.

From 2008 to 2010, Bakewell worked as a part-time cataloger of rare books for the National Trust, cataloging historical book collections around England. In 2010 she published How to Live, a biography of 16th century essayist Michel Eyquem de Montaigne. The book received rave reviews, with The Guardian calling it a "superb, spirited introduction to the master."

The Smart, Bakewell's first book, related the story of an 18th-century forgery trial she came across in the Wellcome collection. In 2002, she quit this job to devote more energy to writing. She published The English Dane, the biography of Danish revolutionary and explorer Jorgen Jorgenson, in 2005.

Bakewell began writing again during her job at the Wellcome Library in London as a curator of early printed books, which she began in the early 1990s. She spent a decade at the library, where she came across interesting historical fragments and a pamphlet that would inspire her first book.

Sarah Bakewell (born 1963) is a British author and professor. She currently lives in London. She received the Windham–Campbell Literature Prize in Non-Fiction.