Margaret Drabble

Margaret Drabble
Drabble at a book signing at Beverley Bookfest in Beverley, England in 2011
Born	(1939-06-05) 5 June 1939 (age 77) Sheffield, England, UK
Occupation	Novelist, biographer and critic
Years active	1963–present
Spouse	Clive Swift (1960–1975) (divorced) Sir Michael Holroyd (1982–present)
Children	Rebecca Swift Adam Swift Joe Swift

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

Drabble was born in Sheffield, the second daughter of the advocate and novelist John F. Drabble and the teacher Kathleen Marie (née Bloor). Her older sister is the novelist and critic Dame Antonia Byatt; the youngest sister is the art historian Helen Langdon, and their brother, Richard Drabble, is a QC.

After attending the Quaker boarding-school Mount School at York, where her mother was employed, Drabble received a major scholarship to Newnham College, Cambridge, where she read English and was awarded a starred first. She joined the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford-upon-Avon in 1960, at one point serving as an understudy for Vanessa Redgrave, before leaving to pursue a career in literary studies and writing.

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.