Josephine Blanche d'Alpuget (born 3 January 1944) is an Australian writer and the second wife of Bob Hawke, the longest-serving Labor Prime Minister of Australia.

She worked at The Sun's rival newspaper, The Daily Mirror, then moved to Indonesia at the age of 22 with her first husband, Tony Pratt, whom she had married in 1965.

She began writing in 1974, inspired by her experiences in South East Asia and has won a number of literary awards for both fiction and non-fiction including, in 1987, the inaugural Australasian Prize for Commonwealth Literature.

[citation needed] In 1995 she joined the board of Robert J. Hawke & Associates, a business consultancy primarily focussed on China.

For fifteen years d'Alpuget abandoned her career as a writer and travelled the world with her new husband, visiting not only capital cities but remote areas of China, Inner Mongolia, Moldova, Easter Island, Palau, Kazakhstan, the North West Frontier of Pakistan and the Antarctic peninsula.

"[5] The magazine Books + Publishing made similar comments stating that "Blanche d'Alpuget's first historical fiction novel comes as a breath of fresh air as she introduces readers to Henry II and the beginning of the House of Plantagenet.

D'Alpuget offers readers a well-researched history of her subject, which of course incorporates the required affairs, plots and intrigues that we have come to expect from any historical novel about royalty and life at court.

She completed the third novel in the quintet, The Lions' Torment, in 2015 but held it back from the market until the fourth, The Lioness Wakes, was finished in early 2017.