Career
After being privately educated at both Queen's College, London and Westminster School, Goodwin studied history at Trinity College, Cambridge. She attended Columbia Film School as a Harkness Scholar and then, in 1985, joined the BBC as a trainee.
In 1998, Goodwin moved to Talkback Productions as head of factual programmes, becoming editorial director by 2003. In 2005, Goodwin founded Silver River Productions, which was sold to Sony in 2011. Her first novel, My Last Duchess, was published in the UK in August 2010 and, under the title The American Heiress, in the U.S. and Canada in June 2011. Goodwin has also compiled multiple poetry anthologies, the first being The Nation's Favourite Love Poems in 1997, and written a memoir entitled Silver River (2007). She was chairman of the judges for the 2010 Orange Prize for women's fiction, and commented in a New Statesman interview that "a recommendation from a woman is more interesting to me than what a man might tell me to read". She has presented television shows including Essential Poems (To Fall In Love With) (2003) and Reader, I Married Him (2006). Jane Thynne, in The Independent, described her as proving to be "triumphantly telegenic" in the former which was Goodwin's front of camera television debut.
Goodwin is the author of the novel Victoria (2016), and creator and writer of the TV series Victoria which was broadcast in the UK by ITV from 2016 to 2019 and in the U.S. by its co-commissioners, PBS/Masterpiece from 2017. Mike Hale, reviewing the series for The New York Times in early 2018, preferred Victoria over The Crown, the series about the reign of Queen Elizabeth II.
In a 2019 interview with the Radio Times, she claimed that repeats of Dad's Army were influencing Brexit.
