Penelope Lively

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Penelope Lively, photographed in 2013

Dame Penelope Margaret Lively, DBE, FRSL (born 17 March 1933) is a prolific, popular and critically acclaimed author of fiction for both children and adults. She has won both the Booker Prize for British novels (Moon Tiger, 1987) and the Carnegie Medal for British children's books (The Ghost of Thomas Kempe, 1973).

Contents

Personal [edit]

Penelope Low was born in Cairo in 1933. She spent her early childhood in Egypt before being sent to boarding school in England at the age of twelve. She read Modern History at St Anne's College, Oxford. She married the academic Jack Lively in 1957 and they lived in Swansea and Oxford, among other places. He died in 1998, and Penelope Lively now lives in north London.

Writer [edit]

Penelope Lively's writing is strongly influenced by her appreciation of the sweeping social changes in Britain during the twentieth century. In this she matches her peers Margaret Drabble, Nina Bawden, A. S. Byatt and others.

Children's fiction [edit]

She first achieved success with children's fiction. Her first book, Astercote, was published by Heinemann in 1970. It is a low fantasy novel set in a Cotswolds village and the neighbouring woodland site of a medieval village wiped out by Plague. Since then she has published more than twenty books for children, achieving particular recognition with The Ghost of Thomas Kempe and A Stitch in Time. For the former she won the 1973 Carnegie Medal from the Library Association, recognising the year's best children's book by a British subject.[1] For the latter she won the 1976 Whitbread Children's Book Award. The three novels feature local history, roughly 600, 300, and 100 years past, in ways that approach time slip but do not posit travel to the past.

Adult works [edit]

Her first novel for adults, The Road to Lichfield, was published in 1977 and made the shortlist for the Booker Prize. She repeated the feat in 1984 with According to Mark, and won the 1987 prize for Moon Tiger, which tells the story of a woman's tempestuous life as she lies dying in a hospital bed. As with all of her fiction, Moon Tiger is marked by a close attention to the power of memory, the impact of the past upon the present, and the tensions between 'official' and personal histories. She explored the same themes more explicitly in her nonfiction works including A House Unlocked (2001) and Oleander, Jacaranda: A Childhood Perceived (1994), a memoir of her Egyptian childhood.

Beside novels and short stories, Penelope Lively has also written radio and television scripts, presented a radio programme and contributed reviews and articles to various newspapers and journals.

Honours [edit]

She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She is also a Vice President of the Friends of the British Library.[2]

She was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 1989, Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 2001, and Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) in the 2012 New Year Honours for services to literature.[3]

Bibliography [edit]

Fiction for children [edit]

Fiction for adults [edit]

Nonfiction [edit]

  • The Presence of the Past: An introduction to landscape history (1976)
  • Oleander, Jacaranda: a Childhood Perceived (1994)
  • A House Unlocked (2001)

See also [edit]

References [edit]

  1. ^ (Carnegie Winner 1973). Living Archive: Celebrating the Carnegie and Greenaway Winners. CILIP. Retrieved 17 August 2012.
  2. ^ "Friends of the British Library Annual Report 2006/07". Retrieved 7 September 2009. 
  3. ^ The London Gazette: (Supplement) no. 60009. p. 6. 31 December 2011.

External links [edit]

Authority control
1969–1979
1980–1989
1990–1999
2000–2009
2010–present
  • Bold = Writer's second win
  • Italics = Writer now deceased
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