Alice Thomas Ellis

1932–2005

English novelist and columnist, born Anna Margaret Lindholm in Liverpool. She studied at Liverpool School of Art and spent a short time in a convent before marrying the publisher Colin Haycraft, whose firm Duckworth she joined as fiction editor. Her first novel, The Sin Eater (1977), was followed by The Birds of the Air, Unexplained Laughter and the Summerhouse Trilogy, and she wrote columns for the Catholic Herald. She moved to Wales after her husband’s death in 1995 and died of lung cancer in March 2005. The 27th Kingdom, set in 1950s Chelsea, was shortlisted for the 1982 Booker Prize.

Timeline of Alice Thomas Ellis’s life

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Prizes