Penelope Lively Explained

Honorific-Prefix:	Dame
Penelope Lively
Birth Date:	1933 3, df=yes
Birth Place:	Cairo, Egypt
Birth Name:	Penelope Margaret Low
Occupation:	Writer
Language:	English
Nationality:	British
Education:	St Anne's College, Oxford
Genre:	Novels, short stories, children's fiction (notably contemporary fantasy)
Period:	1970–present
Children:	2, including Adam Lively
Relatives:	Valentine Low (half-brother) Rachel Reckitt (aunt)^[1]

Dame Penelope Margaret Lively (née Low; born 17 March 1933) is a British writer of fiction for both children and adults. Lively has won both the Booker Prize (Moon Tiger, 1987) and the Carnegie Medal for British children's books (The Ghost of Thomas Kempe, 1973).

Children's fiction

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.^[2]

Lively published more than twenty books for children, achieving particular recognition with The Ghost of Thomas Kempe and A Stitch in Time.^[2] 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.^[3] 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.^[4]

Adult works

Lively's first novel for adults, The Road to Lichfield, was published in 1977 and made the shortlist for the Booker Prize.^[5] She repeated the feat in 1984 with According to Mark, and won the 1987 prize for Moon Tiger, which tells the story of a woman's tempestuous life as she lies dying in a hospital bed. As with all of Lively's fiction, Moon Tiger is marked by close attention to the power of memory, the impact of the past upon the present, and the tensions between "official" and personal histories.

She explored the same themes more explicitly in her nonfiction works, including A House Unlocked (2001) and Oleander, Jacaranda: A Childhood Perceived (1994), a memoir of her Egyptian childhood. Her latest nonfiction work Ammonites & Leaping Fish: A Life in Time, (latterly known as Dancing Fish and Ammonites: A Memoir)^[6] was published in 2013.

Besides novels and short stories, Lively has also written radio and television scripts, presented a radio programme, and contributed reviews and articles to various newspapers and journals.

Personal life

Lively married academic and political theorist Jack Lively in 1957. They had a son and a daughter. Her husband died in 1998.^[7] She currently lives in London. Her house contains paintings, woodcuts and Egyptian potsherds.^[8]

The journalist Valentine Low is Lively's half-brother.^[9]

Honours

Lively is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She is also a vice-president of the Friends of the British Library.^[10] She was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 1989, Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 2001, and Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) in the 2012 New Year Honours for services to literature.

Lively was shortlisted for the Booker Prize: once in 1977 for her first novel, The Road to Lichfield, and again in 1984 for According to Mark. She won the 1987 Booker Prize for her novel Moon Tiger.^{[11] [12]}

Books

Fiction for children

• Astercote (1970)
• The Whispering Knights (1971)
• The Wild Hunt of Hagworthy (1971)
• The Driftway (1972)
  • The Ghost of Thomas Kempe (1973) – Carnegie Medal The House in Norham Gardens (1974)
• Going Back (1975)
• Boy Without a Name (1975)
• A Stitch in Time (1976) – Whitbread Children's Book Award
• The Stained Glass Window (1976), illustrated by Michael Pollard
• Fanny's Sister (1976)
• The Voyage of QV66 (1978)
• Fanny and the Monsters (1979)
• Fanny and the Battle of Potter's Piece (1980)
• The Revenge of Samuel Stokes (1981)
• Uninvited Ghosts and other stories (1984), collection
• Dragon Trouble (1984), illus. Valerie Littlewood
• Debbie and the Little Devil (1987)
• A House Inside Out (1987)
• Princess by Mistake (1993)
• Judy and the Martian (1993)
• The Cat, the Crow and the Banyan Tree (1994), illus. Terry Milne
• Good Night, Sleep Tight (1995), illus. Adriano Gon
  • Two Bears and Joe (1995), illus. Jan Ormerod Staying with Grandpa (1995)
• A Martian Comes to Stay (1995)
• The Disastrous Dog (1995), illus. Robert Bartlett
• Ghostly Guests (1997)
  • One, Two, Three ... Jump! (1998), illus. Jan Ormerod Dragon Trouble (1999), new edition illus. Andrew Rowland
• In Search of a Homeland: The Story of The Aeneid (2001), illus. Ian Andrew

Fiction for adults

• The Road to Lichfield (1977) – Booker Prize finalist
• Nothing Missing but the Samovar, and other stories (1978), collection – Southern Arts Literature Prize
• Treasures of Time (1979) – Arts Council National Book Award
• Judgment Day (1980)
• Next to Nature, Art (1982)
• Perfect Happiness (1983)
• Corruption, and other stories (1984), collection
• According to Mark (1984) – Booker Prize finalist
• Pack of Cards, collected short stories 1978–1986 (1986), collection
• Moon Tiger (1987) – Booker Prize; Whitbread finalist
• Passing On (1989)
• City of the Mind (1991)
• Cleopatra's Sister (1993)
• Heat Wave (1996)
• Beyond the Blue Mountains (1997), collection (U.S. title: The Five Thousand and One Nights)^[13]
• Spiderweb (1998)
• The Photograph (2003)
• Making it up (2005)
• Consequences (2007)
• Family Album (2009) – Costa finalist
• How It All Began (November 2011)
• The Purple Swamp Hen and Other stories (May 2017)

Nonfiction

• The Presence of the Past: An introduction to landscape history (1976)
• Oleander, Jacaranda: a Childhood Perceived (1994), autobiographical
• A House Unlocked (2001), autobiographical
• Ammonites and Leaping Fish (2013), memoir^[14] (subsequently Dancing Fish and Ammonites: A Memoir)
• Life in the Garden (2018), memoir

External links

• • • Audio slideshow interview about Family Album on The Interview Online
  • Interview with Penelope Lively, ALL ABOUT KIDS! TV Series, Episode #165 (1994)
• Interview with Penelope Lively, A DISCUSSION WITH National Authors on Tour TV Series, Episode #79 (1994)

Notes and References

1. Web site: Cressida Connolly. So many rooms - but no room for sentiment . 26 August 2001. 22 February 2019. The Observer.
2. Web site: Dame Penelope Lively . britannica.com . 10 January 2018.
3. Web site: Costa Book Awards . 2009-12-29 . https://web.archive.org/web/20091229131124/http://www.costabookawards.com/downloads/PastWinners.pdf . 2009-12-29 . 2019-06-26.
4. Book: A STITCH IN TIME by Penelope Lively Kirkus Reviews. en.
5. http://themanbookerprize.com/fiction/1977 The Man Booker Prize -fiction, 1977: The Shortlist: '...Peter Smart’s Confessions/ Great Granny Webster/ Shadows on our Skin/ The Road to Lichfield/ Quartet in Autumn'
6. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18114275-dancing-fish-and-ammonites Dancing Fish and Ammonites: A Memoir
7. News: Reeve . Andrew . Obituary: Professor Jack Lively . https://ghostarchive.org/archive/20220525/https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/obituary-professor-jack-lively-1181477.html . 25 May 2022 . subscription . live . 7 March 2019 . The Independent . 30 October 1998.
8. News: 'A Writer Writes': Penelope Lively's Fiction Defies the Test of Time . The New York Times . 4 May 2017 . 11 Jan 2018. McGrath . Charles .
9. News: Low joins Times from Standard. Chris Tryhorn. 9 May 2008. The Guardian. 24 September 2022.
10. Web site: Friends of the British Library Annual Report 2006/07. 7 September 2009.
11. Web site: Penelope Lively . penelopelively.co.uk . 10 Jan 2018.
12. http://themanbookerprize.com/books/moon-tiger-by Moon Tiger By Penelope Lively -Published by Deutsch
13. Beyond the Blue Mountains (1997) London: Viking
14. News: Parker, Peter. Ammonites and Leaping Fish, Penelope LIvely, review. 21 October 2013. The Telegraph.