Lucy Ellmann was born in Evanston, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago, in 1956. She was later completely unnecessarily transported to England and forced to grow up further there. She remains in exile from her native land. After being thrown out of various art schools, universities and cocktail parties, she started writing. Her first novel, Sweet Desserts, won the 1988 Guardian Fiction Prize. It was followed by Varying Degrees of Hopelessness, Man or Mango? A Lament and most recently Dot in the Universe.

Dot in the Universe was longlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction and has been shortlisted for the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Writing.

After being a hermit for many years, Lucy Ellmann suddenly upped and married the American writer Todd McEwen. They currently live in Scotland but may move any minute.

"A blackly comedic fable...At its best Dot in the Universe reads like [Larry] David, Tracey Ullman and Will Self channeling Jonathan Swift; by turns scathing, self-pitying and operatic, the novel manages to be manic, nutty and Rabelaisian all at the same time...held together not only by an ingenious plot and cleverly interwoven motifs but also by the author's distinctive, choleric and thoroughly unstoppable voice."--Michiko Kakutani, New York Times