Anne Chisholm is a biographer and critic who has also worked in journalism and publishing. Her first biography, Nancy Cunard (1979), won the Silver PEN prize for non-fiction; in 1992 the biography of Lord Beaverbrook she wrote jointly with her husband, Michael Davie, was runner up for the Hawthornden prize. In 1998 she wrote the life of the writer Rumer Godden.  Frances Partridge: The Biography was published in 2009.

As a journalist, her first job was on Private Eye; subsequently she was on the staff of Time Magazine in New York and of the Observer. At present, she reviews regularly for the Sunday Telegraph. She has worked as a reader and occasional editor for Jonathan Cape and Bloomsbury, and has been a judge for the Booker Prize, the Duff Cooper Prize for non-fiction and for the V.S. Pritchett short story prize.

In 2003 she was a visiting Fellow in the British Studies programme at the University of Texas; she has run, with Caroline Moorehead, two Arvon Foundation courses in life writing. She is a Fellow and council member of the Royal Society of Literature.