Draft:Rachel Meller

Rachel Elizabeth Meller (born 6 July 1953) is a British author.

Early life and education
Meller was born in London to Jewish refugees from Vienna, who came to England in 1939. Soon after her father Josef Meller's arrival to the United Kingdom as a teenager, he was interned as an "enemy alien" at Mooragh Camp in Ramsey on the Isle of Man. Her mother, Ilse Epstein, grew up in Vienna’s Leopoldstadt district. Postnatal depression led to her suicide a few months after Meller’s birth.

Meller is trained as a neuroscientist, with an undergraduate degree from the University of Sussex and a doctorate from Cambridge University.

Career
Meller authored The Box with the Sunflower Clasp, a creative nonfiction narrative of her Viennese family’s time in World War II Shanghai, and a portrayal of the broader German-speaking refugee community there. Published by Icon Books in 2023, Cambridge critic Anne Garvey described the Box with the Sunflower Clasp as “a profound book… as absorbing as any William Boyd novel," while other reviewers praised it as “engaging” and "a remark­able sto­ry of sur­vival and resilience". Meller’s speaking engagements and interviews include at the Wiener Library, Cambridge University, Times radio, BBC radio, and Book Week, London’s longest-running literary festival.