​​​​​​​Janie Reynolds was born in London in 1963 to a German- Jewish father who escaped Nazi Germany to be adopted by British Quakers, and an English atheist mother with communist sympathies. Before Janie was born, her anthropologist parents lived in the Ugandan jungle studying wild chimpanzees. She won the Faber & Faber ‘Hard Lines’ short story competition at the age of 19 while training to be a journalist at the London College of Printing. She went on to study psychology and philosophy at Middlesex University, then devoted 20 years to animal welfare campaigns, founding her own non-governmental organisation, People Against Chimpanzee Experiments, which fought for and achieved a ban on the use of great apes in medical research. For the past 20 years she has been a practising osteopath.