Stott was born at Cambridge in 1964. She was raised in Brighton in a community of fundamentalist Christians called the Exclusive Brethren, a branch of the Plymouth Brethren, a cult who kept complete separation from the rest of the world in order to prepare themselves for the Rapture or the Second Coming. After a schism in the 1970s, the Stotts left the sect. Stott claims her love of books liberated her from 'the paranoid, black-and-white view of the world [she] grew up in.'

Stott read English and Art History at the University of York, then a Master of Arts and a Ph.D. She taught at the University of York, the University of Leeds, then Anglia Ruskin University at Cambridge before being appointed to a post at the University of East Anglia in Norwich. Stott now teaches half of the year at the University of East Anglia and works the other as a freelance writer. She is also an affiliated scholar at the Department of the History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge.

Stott's atmospheric debut novel, Ghostwalk was shortlisted for the Jelf First Novel Award and the Society of Authors First Novel Award. A ghost story, historical thriller and a love story, it relates the story of a woman, Lydia Brooke, called upon to be the ghostwriter of a book on Sir Isaac Newton's alchemy. Brooke begins to think that the death of the book's author, Cambridge historian Elizabeth Vogelsang, may somehow relate to a series of unsolved seventeenth-century murders. The novel, an innovative mix of fiction and non-fiction, blends seventeenth-century accounts of plague, glassmaking, alchemy and theories of optics with a contemporary plot involving quantum physics and animal rights campaigns. The New York Times compared it to the works of Borges and Edgar Allan Poe.

Stott's second novel, The Coral Thief, set in 1815 post-Napoleonic France, is a thriller that explores religion, rationalism, and evolutionary theory while its hero, a medical student, becomes drawn into a daring jewel heist. It was serialised on Radio Four's Book at Bedtime in January 2010.

Stott, who lives and works in Cambridge, is currently completing a non-fiction book on Darwin's predecessors which will be published by Bloomsbury in 2011.