Dame Margaret Drabble, Lady Holroyd, DBE, FRSL (born 5 June 1939) is an English novelist, biographer, and critic

As of 2016, Drabble has published 19 novels. Her first, A Summer Bird Cage, was published in 1963. Her early novels were published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson (1963–87); more recently, her publishers have been Penguin and Viking. Her third novel, The Millstone (1965), brought her the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize in 1966, and Jerusalem the Golden won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1967. She also wrote The Needle's Eye in 1972.

A theme of her novels is the correlation between contemporary England's society and its individual members. Her characters' tragic faults reflect the political and economic situation and the restriction of conservative surroundings, making the reader aware of the dark spots of a seemingly wealthy country. Most of her protagonists are women.

The realistic descriptions of her figures often owe something to Drabble's personal experiences. Thus, her first novels describe the life of young women during the 1960s and 1970s, for whom the conflict between motherhood and intellectual challenges is being brought into focus, while 1998's The Witch of Exmoor shows the withdrawn existence of an old author. Though inspired by her own life, her works are not mainly autobiographical. She has also written several screenplays, plays and short stories, as well as non-fiction such as A Writer's Britain: Landscape and Literature and biographies of Arnold Bennett and Angus Wilson. Her critical works include studies of William Wordsworth and Thomas Hardy. Drabble also edited two editions of The Oxford Companion to English Literature in 1985 and 2000. In 2011, A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman, a collection of her short stories, was published.

(WIKIPEDIA)

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COVER PHOTOGRAPH BY:

CHRIS YATES

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THE PUBLISHER:

PENGUIN BOOKS

THE YEAR:

1972