Penelope Lively
| Penelope M. Lively | |
|---|---|
Lively in 2013
|
|
| Born |
17 March 1933 Cairo, Egypt |
| Occupation | Writer |
| Language | English |
| Citizenship | British |
| Period | 1970–present |
| Genre | Novels, children's fiction (notably contemporary fantasy) |
| Notable awards |
Carnegie Medal 1973 Booker Prize 1987 |
Dame Penelope Margaret Lively DBE FRSL (born 17 March 1933) is a British writer of fiction for both children and adults. She has won both the Booker Prize (Moon Tiger, 1987) and the Carnegie Medal for British children's books (The Ghost of Thomas Kempe, 1973).
She was born in Cairo, daughter of Roger Low, a bank manager, and Vera (née Greer). She spent her early childhood in Egypt before being sent to boarding school in England at the age of 12. She read Modern History at St Anne's College, Oxford, graduating with honours. She married the academic Jack Lively in 1957, and they had a son and daughter.
Lively first achieved success with children's fiction. Her first book, Astercote, was published by Heinemann in 1970. It is a low fantasy novel set in a Cotswolds village and the neighbouring woodland site of a medieval village wiped out by Plague.
Since then she has published more than twenty books for children, achieving particular recognition with The Ghost of Thomas Kempe and A Stitch in Time. For the former she won the 1973 Carnegie Medal from the Library Association, recognising the year's best children's book by a British subject. For the latter she won the 1976 Whitbread Children's Book Award. The three novels feature local history, roughly 600, 300, and 100 years past, in ways that approach time slip but do not posit travel to the past.
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