Michelle Proud was born in 1940 in Baluchistan, the daughter of Richard Proud, an officer in the Foreign Service, and Kathleen Dunn. She was educated at Cheltenham Ladies' College before coming to Girton College to study history followed by moral sciences, 1958-61. She worked successively for Chatto & Windus Ltd and Penguin Books Ltd during the 1960s. She then went on to work for a number of Peruvian publications in the 1970s, during which time she was also a correspondent in Peru for the Financial Times and the BBC. She also took up freelance writing from the early 1970s onwards. From the mid 1980s to the late 1990s she was a financial analyst in investment banking. She took early retirement in 1997. Michelle Proud died in 2002. There is an obituary for her in the Girton Review, 2002, page 120.