Lucy Ellmann

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Lucy Ellmann (born 1956) is an Anglo-American novelist who now lives in Scotland.

She was born in Evanston, Illinois, into a distinguished academic family. She is the youngest child of the late American scholar Richard Ellmann, best known as the Pullitzer Prize-winning biographer of Oscar Wilde and his wife, Mary, herself a writer and critic. Her mother suffered a cerebral aneurysm when she was 13, from which she never fully recovered. The following year, 1970, the family moved to Oxford. She claims that it took her '20 years to get over it'.

She went to art school, and then studied for a BA at Essex University and an MA at the Courtauld Institute. While studying for her PhD she became pregnant with her daughter, Emily. The relationship failed but she had the baby with the financial support of her father.

It was at this time, she started writing and published her her first book, a thinly disguised autobiographical work called Sweet Desserts which won the Guardian Fiction Prize and that, she claimed, 'offended her entire family'. Her fourth novel, Dot in the Universe, was longlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction.

She had met the American writer Todd McEwen at Hawthornden Castle, a writer's retreat in Scotland, in 1988. It was, she has said, 'virtually love at first sight' but it took them years to finally get together. They later married.^{[citation needed]} They have what she describes as 'an artistic partnership' something her parents also had: 'We love talking about books, and we can help each other with good editing and all of that, which I never thought I'd get. And it is the most precious thing a writer can have, I think, and he never thought he'd find it either.'

She is now a fellow at Queen Margaret University and is an advisory fellow of the Royal Literary Fund.