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Margaret Drabble
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Margaret Drabble
Dame Margaret Drabble, Lady Holroyd, DBE, FRSL (born 5 June 1939) is an English biographer, novelist and short story writer.
Drabble's books include The Millstone (1965), which won the following year's John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize, and Jerusalem the Golden, which won the 1967 James Tait Black Memorial Prize. She was honoured by the University of Cambridge in 2006, having earlier received awards from numerous redbrick (e.g. Sheffield, Hull, Manchester,) and plateglass universities (such as Bradford, Keele, East Anglia and York). She received the American Academy of Arts and Letters E. M. Forster Award in 1973.
Drabble also wrote biographies of Arnold Bennett and Angus Wilson and edited two editions of The Oxford Companion to English Literature and a book on Thomas Hardy.
Drabble was born in Sheffield, the second daughter of the County Court judge and novelist John Frederick Drabble and the teacher Kathleen Marie (née Bloor). Her elder sister was the novelist and critic A. S. Byatt; the youngest sister is art historian Helen Langdon, and their brother is the barrister Richard Drabble, KC. Drabble's father participated in the placement of Jewish refugees in Sheffield during the 1930s. Her mother was a Shavian and her father a Quaker.
After attending The Mount School, a Quaker boarding school at York where her mother was employed, Drabble received a scholarship to Newnham College, Cambridge. She studied English Literature whilst attending Cambridge. She joined the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford-upon-Avon in 1960, and, before leaving to pursue a career in literary studies and writing, served as an understudy for Vanessa Redgrave and Diana Rigg.
Drabble was married to the actor Clive Swift between 1960 and 1975. They had three children, the gardener and TV personality Joe Swift; the academic Adam Swift; and Rebecca Swift (d. 2017), who ran The Literary Consultancy. In 1982, Drabble married the writer and biographer Sir Michael Holroyd; they live in London and Somerset.
Drabble's relationship with her sister A. S. Byatt was sometimes strained because of autobiographical elements in both their writing. While their relationship was not especially close and they did not read each other's books, Drabble described the situation as "normal sibling rivalry" and Byatt said it had been "terribly overstated by gossip columnists" and that the sisters "always have liked each other on the bottom line."
When sought out for interview by The Paris Review's Barbara Milton in 1978, Drabble was described as "smaller than one might expect from looking at her photographs. Her face is finer, prettier and younger, surprisingly young for someone who has produced so many books in the past sixteen years. Her eyes are very clear and attentive and they soften when she is amused, as she often is, by the questions themselves and her own train of thought". In the same interview she admitted there were three writers for whom she felt an "immense admiration": Angus Wilson, Saul Bellow and Doris Lessing.
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Margaret Drabble
Dame Margaret Drabble, Lady Holroyd, DBE, FRSL (born 5 June 1939) is an English biographer, novelist and short story writer.
Drabble's books include The Millstone (1965), which won the following year's John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize, and Jerusalem the Golden, which won the 1967 James Tait Black Memorial Prize. She was honoured by the University of Cambridge in 2006, having earlier received awards from numerous redbrick (e.g. Sheffield, Hull, Manchester,) and plateglass universities (such as Bradford, Keele, East Anglia and York). She received the American Academy of Arts and Letters E. M. Forster Award in 1973.
Drabble also wrote biographies of Arnold Bennett and Angus Wilson and edited two editions of The Oxford Companion to English Literature and a book on Thomas Hardy.
Drabble was born in Sheffield, the second daughter of the County Court judge and novelist John Frederick Drabble and the teacher Kathleen Marie (née Bloor). Her elder sister was the novelist and critic A. S. Byatt; the youngest sister is art historian Helen Langdon, and their brother is the barrister Richard Drabble, KC. Drabble's father participated in the placement of Jewish refugees in Sheffield during the 1930s. Her mother was a Shavian and her father a Quaker.
After attending The Mount School, a Quaker boarding school at York where her mother was employed, Drabble received a scholarship to Newnham College, Cambridge. She studied English Literature whilst attending Cambridge. She joined the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford-upon-Avon in 1960, and, before leaving to pursue a career in literary studies and writing, served as an understudy for Vanessa Redgrave and Diana Rigg.
Drabble was married to the actor Clive Swift between 1960 and 1975. They had three children, the gardener and TV personality Joe Swift; the academic Adam Swift; and Rebecca Swift (d. 2017), who ran The Literary Consultancy. In 1982, Drabble married the writer and biographer Sir Michael Holroyd; they live in London and Somerset.
Drabble's relationship with her sister A. S. Byatt was sometimes strained because of autobiographical elements in both their writing. While their relationship was not especially close and they did not read each other's books, Drabble described the situation as "normal sibling rivalry" and Byatt said it had been "terribly overstated by gossip columnists" and that the sisters "always have liked each other on the bottom line."
When sought out for interview by The Paris Review's Barbara Milton in 1978, Drabble was described as "smaller than one might expect from looking at her photographs. Her face is finer, prettier and younger, surprisingly young for someone who has produced so many books in the past sixteen years. Her eyes are very clear and attentive and they soften when she is amused, as she often is, by the questions themselves and her own train of thought". In the same interview she admitted there were three writers for whom she felt an "immense admiration": Angus Wilson, Saul Bellow and Doris Lessing.
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