Sybille Bedford, OBE (16 March 1911 – 17 February 2006) was a German-born English writer of non-fiction and semi-autobiographical fiction books.

She was born as Sybille Aleid Elsa von Schoenebeck in Charlottenburg, west of Berlin in the Kingdom of Prussia, to Maximilian Josef von Schoenebeck (1853–1925), a German aristocrat, retired lieutenant colonel and art collector, and his German Jewish wife, Elisabeth Bernhardt (1888–1937).

With the rise of fascism in Italy, though, her mother and stepfather settled in Sanary-sur-Mer, a small coastal fishing village in Provence in the south of France, near Toulon and Marseille.

Bedford interacted with and was influenced by many of the German writers who settled in the area during that time, including Thomas Mann and Bertolt Brecht.

Sybille entered a marriage of convenience with an English Army officer, Walter "Terry" Bedford (an ex-boyfriend of a former manservant of W. H. Auden's), whom she described as a friend's "bugger butler",[5] and obtained a British passport.

During this time she had a love affair with an American woman, Evelyn W. Gendel,[7] who left her husband for Bedford and became a writer and editor herself.

A cosmopolitan military man, plainly, with a knowledge of parliamentary government and popular journalism, a dislike of Prussians, a liking for Jews, a belief that everyone speaks French in the home..."[9] Though outwardly a work of fiction, it was somewhat autobiographical – it presents a stylised version of her father's life in Germany, as well as some of the author's early childhood there.

[11] Bedford spent the 1950s, the 1960s and the 1970s living in France, Italy, Britain and Portugal, and during that period had a twenty-year relationship with the American female novelist Eda Lord.