Maggie Gee

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Maggie Gee (born 1948) is an English novelist. She was born in Poole, Dorset, then moved to the Midlands and later to Sussex. She was educated at state schools and at Oxford University (MA, B Litt). She later worked in publishing and then had a research post at Wolverhampton Polytechnic where she completed the department's first PhD. She has written ten novels and a collection of short stories, and is the first female Chair of the Royal Society of Literature and a Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at Sheffield Hallam University. She has also served on the Society of Authors' management committee and the government's Public Lending Right committee. Her seventh novel, The White Family, was shortlisted for the 2003 Orange Prize and the International Impac Prize.

She writes in a broadly modernist tradition, in that her books have a strong overall sense of pattern and meaning, but her writing is characterised by political and social awareness. She turns a satirical eye on contemporary society but is affectionate towards her characters and has an unironised sense of the beauty of the natural world. Her human beings are biological as well as social creatures, partly because of the influence of science and in particular evolutionary biology on her thinking. Where are The Snows, The Ice People and The Flood have all dealt with the near or distant future. She writes through male characters as often as she does through female characters.

The individual human concerns that her stories address include the difficulties of resolving the conflict between total unselfishness, which often leads to secret unhappiness and resentment against the beneficiaries, and selfishness, which can lead to the unhappiness of others, particularly of children. This is a typical quandary of late-20th and early-21st-century women, but it is also a concern for privileged, wealthy, long-lived western human beings as a whole, and widens into global concerns about wealth and poverty and climate change. Her books also explore how the human species relates to non-human animals and to the natural world as a whole. Two of her books, The White Family and My Cleaner, have had racism as a central theme, dealt with as a tragedy in The White Family but as a comedy in My Cleaner. She is currently writing a memoir called My Animal Life as well a a sequel to her novel My Cleaner.

Maggie Gee lives in London with her husband, the writer and broadcaster Nicholas Rankin, author of Dead Man's Chest: Travels after Robert Louis Stevenson and Telegram from Guernica: The Extraordinary Life of George Steer, War Correspondent, and their daughter Rosa.

[edit] Bibliography

Dying, In Other Words (Harvester, 1981)
Anthology of Writing Against War: For Life on Earth (editor) (University of East Anglia, 1982)
The Burning Book (Faber and Faber, 1983)
Light Years (Faber and Faber, 1985, re-issued by Flamingo, 1994, and by Saqi Books, 2005)
Grace (Heinemann, 1988)
Where Are the Snows?' (Heinemann, 1991, re-issued by Saqi Books, 2005.)
Lost Children (Flamingo, 1994)
The Burning Book (Flamingo, 1994)
How May I Speak in My Own Voice? Language and the Forbidden (Birkbeck College: The William Matthews Lecture, 1996)
The Ice People (Richard Cohen Books, 1998, forthcoming from Saqi Books, 2008)
The White Family (Saqi Books, 2002)
Diaspora City: The London New Writing Anthology (contributor) (Arcadia Books, 2003)
The Flood (Saqi Books, 2004)
My Cleaner (Saqi Books, 2005)
The Blue (short stories) (Saqi Books, 2006)