Born in 1942 and raised in Mullingar, County Westmeath, Ireland, one of five children, Josephine Hart was educated at a convent boarding school in Carrickmacross. Josephine’s childhood was tragic: by the time she was seventeen two of her siblings had died of illness and another brother killed himself in an explosion while experimenting with chemicals.

Josephine came to London when she was twenty-two; she joined Haymarket Publishing, eventually becoming its first woman director. In the late 1980s, she founded the Gallery Poets group and the production of Let Us Go Then, You and I, about T. S. Eliot, boasted a six-week run, the first ever for a poetry programme, at the Lyric theatre in Shaftesbury Avenue. She produced a number of West End plays, including the award-winning The House of Bernarda Alba by Lorca and The Black Prince by Iris Murdoch.

She published Damage, her first novel, in 1990. Translated into twenty-six languages, it sold more than a million copies worldwide, and was filmed by Louis Malle, starring Jeremy Irons and Juliette Binoche. She wrote another five novels: Sin (1992), Oblivion (1995), The Stillest Day (1998), The Reconstructionist (2001) and The Truth About Love (2009).

To The Josephine Hart Poetry Hour at the British Library in London, she brought leading actors and artists – Charles Dance, Juliet Stephenson, Edward Fox, Roger Moore, Harriet Walter, Bob Geldof, Harold Pinter, Eileen Atkins, Bono, Kenneth Cranham and Dominic West, to name but a handful - to read WH Auden, Sylvia Plath, WB Yeats, Philip Larkin, Emily Dickinson, Rudyard Kipling, among others. Catching Life By the Throat (2006), her book inspired by these evenings, was given, at her expense, alongside the audio edition, to every single secondary school in the UK. Words That Burn followed in 2008.

In 1984 Josephine married Maurice (now Lord) Saatchi, with whom she had a son, Edward. She had another son, Adam, from her first marriage, to Paul Buckley. She died aged sixty-nine in June 2011.