Margaret Drabble

Winning both the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and the James Tait Memorial Prize by the time she was 28 marked Margaret Drabble as a rising talent in fiction, and her achievements over the next six decades bore out the early accolades....

From her birth in Sheffield in 1939, the young Margaret grew up surrounded by high achievers – her lawyer father was also a novelist, her mother was a teacher, her elder sister would find fame as AS Byatt – and Margaret herself won a scholarship to Newnham College, Cambridge. Soon after graduating in English Literature she married the actor Clive Swift and three years later (in 1963) published her first novel, A Summer Bird-Cage.

The success of her debut prompted her to further explore the use of informal, first-person narrative to convey the experiences of young women in contemporary society, with 1964’s The Garrick Year centred on an extra-marital affair and 1965’s prize-winning The Millstone following an academic whose casual relationship resulted in pregnancy and single motherhood.

In a prolific career Drabble went on to produce 16 more novels, rich with social observation, often capturing the preoccupations of women at different stages of their life, and seeming to conclude with The Dark Flood Rises. Published in 2016 – five years after Drabble was awarded the Golden PEN Award for her ‘Lifetime’s Distinguished Service to Literature’ – it was noted for tackling issues including ageing, mortality and global crises with wit and intelligence.

As well as her novels, Drabble has penned a host of screenplays, short stories and plays, and her non-fiction ranges from biographies of Arnold Bennett and Angus Wilson to a guide to Wordsworth’s poetry; For Queen and Country, an overview of Britain in the Victorian era; and The Pattern in the Carpet, which blends childhood memories with a history of the jigsaw. In addition to writing, Drabble edited the fifth and sixth editions of The Oxford Companion to English Literature and was awarded a DBE in 2008. Married to the biographer Michael Holroyd, she splits her time between London and their ‘hideaway’ in Somerset.