Margaret Drabble
Dame Margaret Drabble has had a long and distinguished career as a novelist, biographer and critic. Her work, often providing clear and intellectual insights into life in England and what it’s like to be a woman in contemporary society, includes 17 fictional novels. She has won numerous prizes, including the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize.
Having studied English Literature at Cambridge, Margaret initially pursued a career in acting, joined the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1960 and serving as an understudy to Vanessa Redgrave. It was during this time that she started writing fiction and soon published her first novel A Summer Bird Cage (1963). Her novels that followed included titles such as The Garrick Year (1964), The Millstone (1965), The Waterfall (1969) and The Needle’s Eye (1972). Her last fictional novel was The Sea Lady (2006).
Aside from fiction, Margaret has also written screenplays, short stories and non-fiction during the course of her career, as well as biographies of other novelists such as Arnold Bennett and Angus Wilson. She recently published her memoirs, entitled The Pattern in the Carpet: A Personal History with Jigsaws (2009), which, according to the The New York Times, “eschews both chronology and raw autobiographical revelation”.
Margaret was made a Dame of the British Empire in 2008.
“One of the country’s best-known and much-loved writers.”
The Telegraph
Links:
- A biography of Margaret Drabble
- A review of Margaret Drabble’s latest book, The Pattern in the Carpet
- A Margaret Drabble interview with The Paris Review
