Talk:Muriel Spark
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Sorry, total noob - but muriel spark has just died, according to italian officials.
Death announced today (15th April), but she died on Thursday (13th April)[1] Kevin McE 10:25, 15 April 2006 (UTC)
The PA copy: 82 PA [DAME MURIEL SPARK BEING BURIED IN ITALIAN VILLAGE By Tim Moynihan and Jennifer Sym, PA Writer Dame Muriel Spark, world famous for the novel The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, was being buried today. She had lived in Italy since the late sixties, and Massimiliano Dindalini, mayor of the Tuscan village of Civitella della Chiana, confirmed that she died on Thursday. The 88-year-old died at a hospital in Florence, and was being buried this afternoon at Oliveto parish church, he said. ...continues... Edinburgh-born Dame Muriel wrote more than 20 novels, the most famous of which was The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, made into an Oscar-winning film starring Maggie Smith, and The Driver's Seat, which was also made into a film. Dr Gavin Wallace, head of literature at the Scottish Arts Council, said Dame Muriel's death was "an ineffably sad and deep loss to our literature". He added: "Her achievement and influence as Scotland's, if not the UK's, greatest novelist have been so vast and far-reaching that in an odd way she seemed to be an immutable part of the cultural landscape. "I wrote to her only two weeks ago with the good news that we had secured the first Muriel Spark international literary fellowship, a new post to which she graciously gave her name. "At least that will offer one modest way of beginning to honour her enormous legacy." Dame Muriel's first novel, The Comforters. was published in 1957 and others have included The Ballad Of Peckham Rye (1960), The Girls Of Slender Means (1963) and Reality And Dreams (1996). She also published biographies of Mary Shelley, Emily Bronte and John Masefield, and wrote radio plays, short stories, and children's books. Created a Dame in 1993, she won a clutch of literary awards, and was made a Doctor of Letters by Scotland's oldest university, St Andrews, in 1998. In 1997, she was chosen to receive the prestigious David Cohen British Literature Prize, awarded by top writers including novelist Ben Okri, actor Griff Rhys Jones and poet Andrew Motion. Previous winners of the biennial British Literature Prize included V S Naipaul and Harold Pinter. It included a #30,000 literary prize and an extra #10,000 put forward by the Arts Council of England to encourage young readers and writers - which she gave to the school which inspired her. She said at the time: "The stated purpose of this award for a lifetime's achievement is one that appeals greatly to me, for I have indeed dedicated a lifetime to the art of letters and to perfecting it to the utmost of my talents and capacities. "I am delighted to receive this award." She added: "It is a wonderful opportunity to be able to present a gift for cultural activities to James Gillespie's High School. "I have particular fondness for the school and I feel very strongly that young people should be encouraged to explore their creative talents." Dame Muriel was born Muriel Sarah Camberg in Edinburgh in 1918. At the age of 19 she married schoolteacher Sidney Oswald Spark and had a son, Robin. They settled in what is now Zimbabwe, but divorced after six years. She returned to London in 1944 and worked in intelligence for the Foreign Office before entering the literary world as a publisher's copy-editor, poet and literary critic. She was general secretary of The Poetry Society and editor of The Poetry Review from 1947 to 1949. Dame Muriel lived in Italy since the late 1960s, first in Rome and later in a converted 13th-century church in Tuscany with her friend of many years, painter and sculptor Penelope Jardine. The Ansa news agency reported in September last year that she had been given the keys to Civitella.
[edit] Muriel Spark was Jewish
"Dame Muriel Spark, the author of "The prime of Miss Jean Brodie" and several other celebrated works, is halachically Jewish. ... Her son Robin, 59, a painter in Edinburgh, has his maternal grandparents' ketubah, or marriage certificate. This records the marriage, on February 1, 1911, of Bernard Cumberg and Sarah Uezzel Hyams, at the East London Synagogue, Stepney." (Jewish Chronicle, March 13 1998, page 1, "Discovered: a lost chapter in L'chaim of Miss Jean Brodie".) Clearly, if both of her parents were Jewish, she must count as Jewish by ethnicity even if she practised another religion.--20.138.246.89 15:06, 23 October 2006 (UTC)
