Hobson grew up in Southampton. She is of Russian heritage through her mother Tatyana (née Vinogradoff) and took local Russian lessons growing up.[2][3] Following her mother's death from cancer, Hobson continued her Russian studies at Edinburgh University.[4] As part of her degree program, she spent a year abroad in the Russian city of Voronezh in 1991–1992.
Her experiences of living in Russia in the earliest phase of its post-Soviet transition became the subject of her travel memoir Black Earth City. The book won the Somerset Maugham Award, and was also nominated for the Duff Cooper Prize and the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award. It was reviewed by the NYT, The Guardian and the FT among others.[5] The book was reissued in 2017 by Faber and Faber with a foreword by Peter Pomerantsev. Hobson's second book, a novel called The Vanishing Futurist, appeared in 2016.[6]
She is married to the writer Philip Marsden.[4]
