Edmund de Waal, born in 1964 in Nottingham, is an artist and writer best known for his large-scale installations of porcelain vessels, which often arise in response to collections and archives or the history of a particular place. His interventions have been created for various spaces and museums around the world, including Waddesdon Manor, Buckinghamshire; the Musée Nissim de Camondo, Paris; the British Museum, London; the Frick Collection, New York; the Ateneo Veneto, Venice; the Schindler House, Los Angeles; the Kunsthistorische Museum, Vienna; and the V&A Museum, London.

De Waal is also known for his best-selling family memoirs Der Hase mit den Bernsteinaugen (2010) and The White Road (2015). His most recent book, Letters to Camondo, a series of poignant letters written during the lockdown, was published in April 2021. In 2015, he received the Windham-Campbell Prize for Non-Fiction from Yale University. In 2021, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and was awarded a CBE for services to the arts. In 2024, he was named Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. He lives and works in London.