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Winifred Mary Foley (25 July 1914, Brierley, Gloucestershire – 21 March 2009, Cheltenham) was an English writer.

Her best known work was the autobiographical A Child in the Forest (1974), mainly an account of her childhood in the Forest of Dean, although it also includes her experiences as an adolescent domestic servant in London and elsewhere, up to the point where she meets her future husband, Sidney. It has been compared with Laurie Lee's Cider with Rosie, but there are some differences, e.g. Foley makes clear the grinding poverty of her childhood.

It was serialised on BBC radio's Woman's Hour in 1973. One chapter about a job as a domestic servant was dramatised as a TV programme Abide With Me. Subsequent works of autobiography were No Pipe Dreams for Father in 1977, Back to the Forest in 1981 and In and Out of the Forest, first published in 1984 and later rewritten.

Winifred Foley died on 21 March 2009, some three days before her original book was re-released under the new title Full Hearts And Empty Bellies. It was serialised in the Daily Mail and went on to reach the Times Bestsellers list Top 10.

There is a bench dedicated in memory of her and her husband on the top of the Forest of Dean beauty point of May Hill.

This author page uses material from the Wikipedia article "Winifred Foley", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0