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Sarah Mary Malet Bradford, Viscountess Bangor (née Hayes; born 3 September 1938[1]) is an English author who is best known for her royal biographies.
Bradford was born in Bournemouth in 1938, the daughter of Brigadier Hilary Anthony Hayes DSO OBE.[2][3] She was educated at St Mary's School, Shaftesbury, Dorset. She won a State scholarship to Lady Margaret Hall, University of Oxford, but met Anthony Bradford, a real estate developer, at Oxford, and abandoned her degree to marry him.[3] The couple lived in Barbados, Lisbon, and Sardinia; they had two children, but divorced.
Sarah Bradford then worked for the manuscript department of the auctioneer Christie's in London, where she met her second husband, William Maxwell David Ward, Viscount Bangor; the two married in 1976.
Her first book, The Englishman's Wine, was written while she lived in Portugal. She has published more than a dozen books. Her husband became 8th Viscount Bangor in 1993.[3] The couple live in London. Bradford was interviewed in connection with the 1994 edition of the PBS video The Windsors: A Royal Family, with the 2007 BBC documentary Gladstone and Disraeli, and assisted with screenwriting for The Borgias, a 2011 television series. In 2012, she was working on a biography of Queen Victoria.[3]