Penelope Lively

Penelope Lively, born in Cairo in 1933, is a British novelist who wrote for both children and adults. She began her career with children's fiction and later built a substantial reputation with adult novels, becoming one of the most respected British writers of the late twentieth century. Her work is a useful guide to how English fiction handled memory and history.

She spent much of her childhood in Egypt before being sent to England at the age of twelve. She studied modern history at St Anne's College, Oxford. In 1957 she married the political theorist Jack Lively, and the couple lived in Swansea and Oxford before settling in north London, where she still lives. Jack died in 1998.

Her reputation first grew through children's books. Her debut, Astercote, came out in 1970, and later titles blended fantasy with local history, among them The Ghost of Thomas Kempe, which won the Carnegie Medal. Her first adult novel, The Road to Lichfield (1977), was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and According to Mark earned a second shortlisting in 1984. In 1987 she finally won the Booker with Moon Tiger.

Her fiction keeps returning to the force of memory, the way the past shapes the present, and the tension between official and personal accounts of events. She pursued the same themes more directly in non-fiction such as Oleander, Jacaranda (1994), a account of her Egyptian childhood, and A House Unlocked (2001).

Alongside her novels and stories, she wrote radio and television scripts, presented a radio programme and contributed to newspapers and journals. She was appointed to the Order of the British Empire at several levels. Her legacy lies largely in how she joined imaginative children's fiction with an adult meditation on time and memory.