Zoe Fairbairns

Zoe Fairbairns
Born	20 December 1948 England
Occupation	writer

Zoe Fairbairns (born 1948) is a British feminist writer who has authored novels, short stories, radio plays and political pamphlets.

Zoe Fairbairns was born in 1948, and educated at St. Andrews University, Scotland, and the College of William and Mary, US. She was the poetry editor for Spare Rib, in the same decade working as part of a collective of women writers to produce Tales I Tell My Mother. Fairbairns has worked as a freelance journalist and a creative writing tutor; she has also held appointments as Writer in Residence at Bromley Schools (1981–83 and 1985–89), Deakin University, Geelong, Australia (1983), Sunderland Polytechnic (1983–85) and Surrey County Council (1989). More recently she has worked as a subtitler and audio describer. She lives in South London and currently teaches Creative Writing at City Lit.

Fairbairns is best known for her novels, especially Benefits (1979), Stand We at Last (1983), Here Today (1984) and Closing (1987).

Live as Family, Fairbairns' debut, was published when the author was just 19. A contemporary re-working of the Jane Eyre idea, it brought Fairbairns significant attention. Down (1969), has a first-person male narrator; it was followed by Benefits, a dystopia imagining life in Britain in the future, with a political party in power that has undone the work of feminism and returned women to the home. It has been compared to Margaret Atwood's later The Handmaid's Tale.Stand We at Last is a historical novel written from a feminist perspective; it politically subverts the form of the family saga, in the same way that Here Today is a crime novel, while pushing the genre to its limits. This novel asks questions about female identity in the contemporary world, and depicts the marginalisation of 'temps' owing to new technology. Closing traces the lives of women who meet at a sales training course, and argues that capitalism can have benefits for the women's movement. The three 1980s novels were commercially successful, and Here Today won the Fawcett Book Prize. Daddy's Girls (1992) is, like Stand We At Last, a family saga that spotlights women in society, but in a more recent world. Other Names (1998) shows the effects of both the Lloyd's financial crisis, and a typical philanderer, on two women of different generations.

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