Maisie Mosco was born in Oldham, north of Manchester, England on December 7, 1924, the eldest of three children. Her parents were of Latvian Jewish and Viennese Jewish descent, and both sides emigrated to England around the turn of the 20th century. A clever girl, she wanted to study medicine but her mother's illness meant that, as the eldest child, she had to leave school at the age of 14 to help in the family business. At the age of 18 she joined the ATS and ended the war helping to teach illiterate soldiers how to read. After the war, she edited a Manchester Jewish weekly newspaper, the Jewish Gazette, subsequently writing radio plays for the BBC, followed by 16 novels between 1979 and 1998. These include the 'Almonds and Raisins' trilogy, about a Jewish family who around 1900 fled Anti-Jewish pogroms in the Russian Empire and emigrated to north Manchester in England. These books contained elements of her own family history.
She died in London on 31 October 2011.