Kaliane Mong Huxham Bradley was born in Walthamstow, East London, to a British father and a Cambodian Khmer mother. Bradley grew up in a small house with a maternal older half-brother and younger twin sisters. The family moved out to Essex when Bradley was 10 for more space.
In 2012, Bradley joined Granta magazine as an editorial assistant.[2] She was later promoted to junior editor and commissioning editor, and worked for Granta’s imprint Portobello.[3] From 2016 to 2021, she wrote theatre and dance reviews and interviews for Exeunt Magazine, Time Out London, The Stage, and The Guardian.[4]
Bradley won the 2022 Harper’s Bazaar Short Story Competition for “Golden Years”[5] and the VS Pritchett Short Story Prize for “Doggerland”, the latter awarded by the Royal Society of Literature.[6]
In 2023, Bradley secured a book deal with Sceptre Books, a Hodder & Stoughton imprint, in addition to translations in 13 territories and an adaptation auction between 21 production companies.[7] Her debut novel The Ministry of Time, a time travel romance based around Franklin’s lost expedition, was published in May 2024. Bradley had become inspired watching the AMC series The Terror during lockdown.[8] Ahead of the novel’s release, the BBC commissioned an adaptation penned by Alice Birch, as announced in February.[9] The Ministry of Time was shortlisted for the Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize[10] and the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize.[11] Bradley was named one of the 10 best new novelists of 2024 by The Observer.