Penelope Lively (b.1933,) fully Dame Penelope Margaret Lively, originally Penelope Margaret Low, is an English novelist and children’s author. Her well-plotted novels and short stories emphasize the consequence of memory and historical continuity.
Born in Cairo, Lively read history at Oxford. A preoccupation with the relation of the present and the past, and a vivid sense of time and place, form the central thread of much of her writing, notably in her children’s books The Ghost of Thomas Kempe (1973, Carnegie Medal) and A Stitch in Time (1976, Whitbread Children’s Book Award.)
Lively’s novels for adults include The Road to Lichfield (1977,) Judgement Day (1980,) Moon Tiger (1987; Booker Prize; about the reminiscences of an intellectual older woman,) Cleopatra’s Sister (1993,) and Spiderweb (1998.) Her many short stories are collected in Pack of Cards (1986.)
Lively also wrote Oleander, Jacaranda (1994,) an autobiography of her early years in Egypt, A House Unlocked (2001,) a reflection on her family’s house in Somerset, the novel The Photograph (2003,) and the experimental memoir Making It Up (2005.)
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Penelope Lively
People die, but money never does.
—Penelope Lively
Topics: Money
Unless I am a part of everything I am nothing.
—Penelope Lively
Topics: Part of The Whole
Language tethers us to the world; without it we spin like atoms
—Penelope Lively
Topics: Language
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