Ann Quin

Ann Quin (born 17 March 1936 in Brighton, Sussex – ? August 1973) was a British writer noted for her experimental style. The author of Berg (1964), Three (1966), Passages (1969) and Tripticks (1972), she committed suicide in 1973 at the age of 37. In the 21st century Stewart Home has written in admiration of her work, which remains largely overlooked, although Berg was adapted for film in 1989 as Killing Dad starring Denholm Elliott and Richard E. Grant.

Quin was born in Brighton in March 1936, in a family on the fringes of the working-class and lower-middle class; her father left them and she was raised by her mother alone. She was educated at a Roman Catholic school, the Convent of the Blessed Sacrament in Brighton, until the age of 17. She trained as a shorthand typist and worked in a solicitor's office, then at a publishing company when she moved to Soho and began writing novels.

Quin is also said to have ghost-written the thesis of her then partner, pop artist Billy Apple.

She suffered mental health problems, receiving electro-shock treatment. She committed suicide in 1973, drowning herself by swimming out into the sea off Brighton's Palace Pier, weeks before the death of her contemporary B. S. Johnson.

Quin is associated with a loosely constituted circle of 'experimental' authors in Sixties Britain, headed by B. S. Johnson and including Stefan Themerson, Rayner Heppenstall, Alan Burns and Eva Figes, influenced by Samuel Beckett and recent French fiction (Marguerite Duras, Alain Robbe-Grillet). They stood in opposition to the dominant tendency for social realism, manifest from John Osborne and John Wain to Karl Miller's Writing in England Today (Penguin, 1968).

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