Adele Lang grew up in England in the 1970s. She emigrated to Australia with her family as a 16-year-old, worked in Perth as a journalist and then as a copy writer with an inner-city advertising agency in Melbourne. In 1996, Jonathan Green commissioned her to write for the Age. A column in the form of a fictional diary, entitled 'What Katy Did Next', began in July 1996 and ran to November 1997. These columns formed the basis of the novel What Katya Did Next, published in 1998. The book met with very limited success, but in 2002 an American edition, issued with the title Confessions of a Sociopathic Social Climber, became a major bestseller.
Lang left Australia and returned to London in the late 1990s, where she began writing a column for Marie Claire magazine. In addition to her novel, she has written and co-authored books of humour, including Horrorscopes : How to Spot a Bastard by His Star Sign (1996), Bosstrology : The Twelve Bastard Bosses of the Zodiac (1997), and The Best Book of Girls Behaving Badly Ever! (1999).
