Penelope Lively

Penelope M. Lively

Lively in 2013
Born (1933-03-17) 17 March 1933
Cairo, Egypt
Occupation Writer
Language English
Citizenship British
Period 1970–present
Genre Novels, children's fiction (notably contemporary fantasy)
Notable awards Carnegie Medal
1973
Booker Prize
1987

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

Personal life

She was born in Cairo, daughter of Roger Low, a bank manager, and Vera (née Greer).[1] She spent her early childhood in Egypt before being sent to boarding school in England at the age of 12. She read Modern History at St Anne's College, Oxford, graduating with honours. She married the academic Jack Lively in 1957, and they had a son and daughter.[1]

Children's fiction

Lively 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.[2] 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

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 Lively's 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. Her latest work, Dancing Fish and Ammonites, A Memoir, was published in 2013.

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

Honours

Lively is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She is also a Vice-President of the Friends of the British Library.[3]

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.[4]

Books

Fiction for children

  • Astercote (1970)
  • The Whispering Knights (1971)
  • The Wild Hunt of Hagworthy (1971)
  • The Driftway (1972)
  • The Ghost of Thomas Kempe (1973) – Carnegie Medal
  • The House in Norham Gardens (1974)
  • Going Back (1975)
  • Boy Without a Name (1975)
  • A Stitch in Time (1976) – Whitbread Children's Book Award
  • The Stained Glass Window (1976), illustrated by Michael Pollard
  • Fanny's Sister (1976)
  • The Voyage of QV66 (1978)
  • Fanny and the Monsters (1978)
  • Fanny and the Battle of Potter's Piece (1980)
  • The Revenge of Samuel Stokes (1981)
  • Uninvited Ghosts and other stories (1984), collection
  • Dragon Trouble (1984), illus. Valerie Littlewood
  • Debbie and the Little Devil (1987)
  • A House Inside Out (1987)
  • Princess by Mistake (1993)
  • Judy and the Martian (1993)
  • The Cat, the Crow and the Banyan Tree (1994), illus. Terry Milne
  • Good Night, Sleep Tight (1995), illus. Adriano Gon
  • Two Bears and Joe (1995), illus. Jan Ormerod
  • Staying with Grandpa (1995)
  • A Martian Comes to Stay (1995)
  • The Disastrous Dog (1995), illus. Robert Bartlett
  • Ghostly Guests (1997)
  • One, Two, Three ... Jump! (1998), illus. Jan Ormerod
  • Dragon Trouble (1999), new edition illus. Andrew Rowland
  • In Search of a Homeland; The Story of The Aeneid (2001), illus. Ian Andrew

Fiction for adults

  • The Road to Lichfield (1977) – Booker Prize finalist
  • Nothing Missing but the Samovar, and other stories (1978), collection – Southern Arts Literature Prize
  • Treasures of Time (1979) – Arts Council National Book Award
  • Judgment Day (1980)
  • Next to Nature, Art (1982)
  • Perfect Happiness (1983)
  • Corruption, and other stories (1984), collection
  • According to Mark (1984) – Booker Prize finalist
  • Pack of Cards, collected short stories 1978–1986 (1986), collection
  • Moon Tiger (1987) – Booker Prize; Whitbread finalist
  • Passing On (1989)
  • City of the Mind (1991)
  • Cleopatra's Sister (1993)
  • Heat Wave (1996)
  • Beyond the Blue Mountains (1997), collection (U.S. title: The Five Thousand and One Nights)[5]
  • Spiderweb (1998)
  • The Photograph (2003)
  • Making it up (2005)
  • Consequences (2007)
  • Family Album (2009) – Costa finalist
  • How It All Began (November 2011)

Nonfiction

  • The Presence of the Past: An introduction to landscape history (1976)
  • Oleander, Jacaranda: a Childhood Perceived (1994), autobiographical
  • A House Unlocked (2001), autobiographical
  • Ammonites and Leaping Fish (2013), memoir

References

  1. 1 2 "Lively, Penelope 1933-". encyclopedia.com. Retrieved 12 March 2015.
  2. ↑ (Carnegie Winner 1973). Living Archive: Celebrating the Carnegie and Greenaway Winners. CILIP. Retrieved 17 August 2012.
  3. ↑ "Friends of the British Library Annual Report 2006/07" (PDF). Retrieved 7 September 2009.
  4. ↑ The London Gazette: (Supplement) no. 60009. p. 6. 31 December 2011.
  5. ↑ London: Viking ISBN 9780670869053
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