Anna Haycraft

Alice Thomas Ellis (born Ann Margaret Lindholm, 9 September 1932 – 8 March 2005) was a British writer and essayist. She was the author of numerous novels, and also of some non-fiction, including cookery books. Although her married name was Anna Haycraft, she is best known by her nom-de-plume.

Ellis was born in Liverpool. Her father was half Finnish, and her mother Welsh. She spent part of her childhood as an evacuee in North Wales, a period she later wrote about in A Welsh Childhood. She later moved to Camden in North London.

Ellis' parents belonged to the positivist and atheist Church of Humanity founded by Auguste Comte, but she left to become a Roman Catholic at the age of 19. Shortly afterwards, she entered a convent as a postulant, but had to leave due to a health condition.

In 1956, she married Colin Haycraft, owner of the publishing company, Duckworth. They were happily married until his death, in 1995. The couple had seven children (William being the oldest, and an enthusiastic player of Avalon Hill war games), raised in Anna's religion, but they were also struck by tragedy: their daughter Mary died in infancy at the age of two days, and their son Joshua spent ten months in a coma after an accident, and died at the age of nineteen in 1978.

The Birds of the Air is dedicated to her son, Joshua, with the following inscription:

She published her first novel, The Sin Eater, in 1977 under the pen name of Alice Thomas Ellis, which she used in all her subsequent writing.

She was well known as a hostess; her skill at cooking and entertaining was a considerable asset to the Duckworth company. Her cookery books include All-natural Baby Food (published Fontana/Collins, 1977) and Darling, you shouldn't have gone to so much trouble, co-written with Caroline Blackwood. Caroline Blackwood and her husband, the American poet Robert Lowell, were frequent visitors to the Haycraft home. She was also a close friend of Beryl Bainbridge.

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