Economic promiscuity

For a decade she worked in the financial heart of the UK, becoming the first woman to be made a managing director at Morgan Stanley. There she claims she learned everything she needed to know about human nature, an education in trust, fear, and greed which she later supplemented with a PhD in Critical and Creative Writing.

Both sides of Campbell are on show in the Orange Prize long-listed On the Floor. The novel follows 28-year-old Geri Molloy across the financial markets of London and Hong Kong during the early 1990s, an evocative portrayal of wildly amoral economic promiscuity which never shies away from the toll such a lifestyle takes on the protagonist. Indeed, Geri manages to make it home only once in the course of the entire book.