Penelope Fitzgerald

1916–2000

English novelist, biographer and poet who began publishing in her late fifties. The daughter of the Punch editor E.V. Knox, she studied at Somerville College, Oxford, and worked for the BBC during the Second World War. After biographies of Edward Burne-Jones and her father and uncles, she wrote novels drawn from her own life, including The Bookshop, and won the 1979 Booker Prize with Offshore. Her later historical novels include Innocence, The Beginning of Spring and The Blue Flower. She died in April 2000. The Gate of Angels, set in Cambridge in 1912, was shortlisted for the 1990 Booker Prize.

Timeline of Penelope Fitzgerald’s life

Works

• The Gate of Angels (1990)

Prizes

• The Gate of Angels — The Booker Prize 1990: Shortlist