Claire Tomalin

Claire Tomalin (nėe Delavenay, 20 June 1933) is an English biographer and journalist. She was educated at Newnham College, Cambridge.

She was literary editor of the New Statesman and of the Sunday Times, and has written several noted biographies. Her work has been recognised with the award of the 1990 James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the 1991 Hawthornden Prize for The Invisible Woman: The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens. Her biography of Samuel Pepys won the Whitbread Book Award in 2002, the Rose Mary Crawshay Prize in 2003, the Latham Prize of the Samuel Pepys Club in 2003, and was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize in 2003.

Claire Tomalin is Vice-President of the Royal Society of Literature and of the English PEN (International PEN).

Tomalin's first husband Nicholas Tomalin, a prominent journalist, was killed in the Arab-Israeli Yom Kippur War in 1973; she is now married to the novelist and playwright Michael Frayn.

Awards and honours

• 2011 Costa Book Awards (Biography), shortlist, Charles Dickens: A Life

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Selected works

• Charles Dickens: A Life, 2011
• Thomas Hardy: The Time-Torn Man, 2007, ISBN 978-1594201189
• Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self, (New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 2002), ISBN 0-670-88568-1 or ISBN 0-14-028234-3
• Jane Austen: A Life, 2000, ISBN 0-14-029690-5
• Several Strangers; writing from three decades, 1999, Viking, London.
• Katherine Mansfield: A Secret Life, (London, Viking, 1987)1998, ISBN 0-14-011715-6
• Mrs. Jordan's Profession: The Story of a Great Actress and a Future King, 1995, ISBN 0-14-015923-1
• Shelley and His World, 1992, ISBN 978-0140171525
• The Invisible Woman: The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens, (New York, Knopf, 1991), ISBN 0-14-012136-
• The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft (London, Weidenfeld & Nicolsen, 1974), 1992, ISBN 0-14-016761-7

Trivia

She made a number of tongue-in-cheek criticisms against the Samuel Pepys Wikipedia article in The Guardian on 24 October 2005, awarding the page a score of 6/10. On 4 April 2009, Tomalin wrote to The Guardian and expressed facts on Thomas Hardy's life. The letter was titled "A Poet to the End".

Further reading

• 'Aida Edemariam meets Claire Tomalin' The Guardian 18 November 2006
• 'Claire Tomalin: a Life in Words' BBC World News, Entertainment, 29 Jan 2003
• Claire Tomalin at www.contemporarywriters

Awards and achievements
Preceded by Wendy Doniger K. Flint	Rose Mary Crawshay Prize 2003 and Jane Stabler	Succeeded by Maud Ellmann Anne Stott