Kate Atkinson

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Kate Atkinson (b. 1951) is an English author.

1 Her life
2 Her works
3 Published works
4 External links

[edit] Her life

She was born in York, and studied English Literature at the University of Dundee, gaining her Masters Degree in 1974. During her final year of this course, she was married for the first time. The marriage lasted only two years, but produced Atkinson's first daughter, Eve, who was born in 1975. She subsequently studied for a doctorate in American Literature which she failed at the viva stage. After leaving university, she took on a variety of miscellaneous jobs from home help to legal secretary and teacher. She lived in Whitby, Yorkshire for a time, but now lives in Edinburgh.

[edit] Her works

Her first novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum, won the 1995 Whitbread Book of the Year ahead of Salman Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh and Roy Jenkins's biography of William Gladstone. Since then, she has published another four novels, one play, and one collection of short stories. She is a comic novelist whose style often juxtaposes mundane everyday life with fantastic magical events, a technique that contributes to her work's pervasive magic realism. She has frequently criticised the media's coverage of her work - when she won Whitbread, for example, it was the fact that she was a 'single mother' who lived outside London that garnered the most attention.