Dame Penelope Margaret Lively, DBE, FRSL (born 17 March 1933) is a prolific, popular and critically acclaimed author of fiction for both children and adults. She has been shortlisted three times for the Booker Prize, winning once for Moon Tiger in 1987.
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Penelope Low was born in Cairo in 1933. She spent her early childhood in Egypt, before being sent to boarding school in England at the age of twelve. She read Modern History at St Anne's College, Oxford. She married the academic Jack Lively in 1957 and lived with him in Swansea and Oxford, among other places; he died in 1998, and Penelope Lively now lives in north London.
Her writing, like that of her peers Margaret Drabble, Nina Bawden, A. S. Byatt and others, is influenced strongly by an awareness of, and a response to, the sweeping social changes that have taken place in Britain in the course of the twentieth century.
Lively first achieved success with her children's fiction. Her first book, Astercote, was published in 1970. Since then, she has published many other books for children, achieving particular recognition with The Ghost of Thomas Kempe (1973) for which she received the Carnegie Medal and with A Stitch in Time (1976) which won her the Whitbread Award for best children's book.
Her first novel for adults, The Road to Lichfield, was published in 1977 and made the shortlist for the Booker Prize. She repeated this feat in 1984 with According to Mark, and eventually won the prize in 1987 with Moon Tiger, which tells the story of a woman's tempestuous life as she lies dying in a hospital bed. As is the case with all of Lively's fiction, the novel is marked by a close attention to the power of memory, the impact of the past upon the present, and the tensions between 'official' and personal histories. These are themes explored more explicitly in such non-fiction titles as A House Unlocked (2001) and Oleander, Jacaranda: A Childhood Perceived (1994), Lively's memoir of her Egyptian childhood.
In addition to writing novels and short stories, Penelope Lively has also written radio and television scripts, presented a radio programme and contributed reviews and articles to various newspapers and journals.
She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She is also a Vice President of the Friends of the British Library.[1]
She was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 1989, Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 2001, and Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) in the 2012 New Year Honours for services to literature.[2]