Kate Atkinson MBE (born 20 December 1951) is an English writer of novels, plays and short stories. She has written historical novels, detective novels and family novels, incorporating postmodern and magical realist elements into the plots. Her debut, Behind the Scenes at the Museum, won the Whitbread Book Award, the precursor to the Costa Book Award, in 1995. The novels Life After Life and A God in Ruins won the Costa Book Award for novel in 2013 and 2015. She is also known for the Jackson Brodie series of detective novels, which has been adapted into the BBC One series, Case Histories.

The daughter of a shopkeeper, Atkinson was born in York, the setting for several of her books. She was an only child and often had to find ways to amuse herself. She describes herself as an anxious child, something she believes had to do with being illegitimate. Her parents lived together but were not married, because her mother could not divorce her first husband. At the time, that was considered scandalous.

She studied English literature at the University of Dundee, gaining her master's degree in 1974. Atkinson subsequently studied for a doctorate in American literature, with a thesis titled "The post-modern American short story in its historical context". Postmodern stylistic elements can be found in her own literary work. She failed at the viva (oral examination) stage. After leaving the university, she took on a variety of jobs, from home help to legal secretary and teacher, until her breakthrough as a writer in 1995.

Atkinson was appointed a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in the 2011 Birthday Honours for services to literature. In 2015, she became the first author to win a Costa Book Award three times when her book A God in Ruins won the Novel of the Year award. On 30 November 2018, she was the guest on BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs. She currently lives in the Grange district of Edinburgh.

Atkinson was in her thirties when she began writing short stories. One of her stories won a prize in a Woman's Own writing contest in 1986, which encouraged her to continue writing, and she published stories in several magazines and newspapers. She has said that writing short stories was a good learning experience because she was forced to tell her story as efficiently as possible. In 1993, she won the Ian St. James Award for the story Karmic Mothers-Fact or Fiction? This is a story about two women who are both recovering from a suicide attempt in a hospital room next to the maternity ward. In 1997, the story was adapted for television.

In 1995 she published her first novel, the tragicomic Behind the Scenes at the Museum. Based on the childhood memories of young woman Ruby Lennox, the novel tells the story of a family during World War I and World War II. The book went on to be a Sunday Times bestseller and at once established her name as a writer. Some critics, however, dismissed it as a feminist manifesto. Behind the Scenes at the Museum was awarded the Whitbread Prize in the categories of “best debut,” and “Book of the Year.” The latter led to some commotion in the media; the debut novel by the unknown Atkinson had been selected over the winner in the “best novel” category, The Moor's Last Sigh by Salman Rushdie. Behind the Scenes at the Museum has been adapted for radio and stage. Atkinson herself wrote the screenplay for a television adaptation.

In her next two novels, Human Croquet (1997) and Emotionally Weird (2000), Atkinson experimented with different stylistic elements and narrative techniques. In Emotionally Weird, for example, she uses different fonts to distinguish characters and locations. In 2000, her play Abandonment premiered in Edinburgh. In 2002 she published a collection of short stories entitled Not the End of the World.

In 2004, Case Histories, a novel centered around the private investigator Jackson Brodie, was published; he was Atkinson's first male protagonist. Three more Brodie novels followed: One Good Turn (2006), When Will There Be Good News? (2008) and Started Early Took My Dog (2010). The series was adapted for television with Jason Isaacs as Jackson Brodie.