Claire Tomalin (born Claire Delavenay; 20 June 1933) is an English biographer and journalist. She studied at Newnham College, Cambridge.
She was literary editor of the New Statesman and of the Sunday Times, and has written several noted biographies. Her work has been recognised with the award of the 1990 James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the 1991 Hawthornden Prize for The Invisible Woman: The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens. Her biography of Samuel Pepys won the Whitbread Book Award in 2002, the Rose Mary Crawshay Prize in 2003, the Latham Prize of the Samuel Pepys Club in 2003, and was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize in 2003.
Claire Tomalin is Vice-President of the Royal Society of Literature and of the English PEN (International PEN).
Tomalin's first husband Nicholas Tomalin, a prominent journalist, was killed in the Arab-Israeli Yom Kippur War in 1973; she is now married to the novelist and playwright Michael Frayn.
She made a number of tongue-in-cheek criticisms against the Samuel Pepys Wikipedia article in The Guardian on 24 October 2005, awarding the page a score of 6/10. On the 4 April 2009, Tomalin wrote in to The Guardian and expressed facts on Thomas Hardy's life. The letter was titled "A Poet to the End".