Margaret Drabble

Novelist, biographer and critic Margaret Drabble was born in Sheffield on 5 June 1939.

She was educated at the Mount School, a Quaker boarding school in York, and read English at Newnham College, Cambridge. She became an actress and worked for the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford-upon-Avon before her first novel, A Summer Birdcage, the story of the relationship between two sisters, was published in 1963. Her other novels include The Garrick Year (1964), set in the theatre world; The Millstone (1965), winner of the Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, in which a young academic becomes pregnant after a casual relationship; Jerusalem the Golden (1967), winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize (for fiction), about a young woman from the north of England at university in London; The Waterfall (1969), a formally experimental narrative; The Needle's Eye (1972), winner of the Yorkshire PostBook Award (Finest Fiction), the story of a young heiress who gives away her inheritance; and The Realms of Gold (1975), about a prominent archaeologist juggling the different aspects of her life. The Ice Age(1977) examines the social and economic plight of England in the mid-1970s while in The Middle Ground(1980) a journalist is forced to take-stock of her life.The Radiant Way (1987), A Natural Curiosity (1989) and The Gates of Ivory (1991) form a trilogy of novels describing the experiences of three friends living through the 1980s. The Witch of Exmoor (1996) is a portrait of contemporary Britain. The Peppered Moth (2001) explores four generations in one family beginning with Bessie Bawtry's childhood spent growing up in a South Yorkshire mining town at the beginning of the twentieth century. Candida Wilton, the central character in her novel The Seven Sisters (2002), begins a new life in London after the breakdown of her marriage. A surprise windfall gives her the opportunity to travel to Italy with friends and explore new experiences. Her most recent novel is The Sea Lady (2006). Margaret Drabble is also the author of biographies of Arnold Bennett (1974) and Angus Wilson (1995), and is editor of both the fifth (1985) and sixth (2000) editions of The Oxford Companion to English Literature.She is a former Chairman of the National Book League (1980-82), and was awarded the CBE in 1980. She received the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1973, and holds honorary doctorates from the universities of Sheffield (1976), Manchester (1987), Keele (1988), Bradford (1988), Hull (1992), East Anglia (1994) and York (1995).

Her latest books are the memoir, The Pattern in the Carpet (2009), in which she looks at her own life, the history of games and the delights of puzzling and A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman (2011), a collection of short stories.

Margaret Drabble is married to the biographer Michael Holroyd and lives in London and Somerset. Her sister is the novelist and critic A. S. Byatt. In 2008 she was made a DBE.