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VICTORIA GLENDINNING
Researcher and author of “Electricity”
London, England
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Biographer, critic, broadcaster and novelist Victoria Glendinning was born in Sheffield, England on 23 April 1937.
She was educated at Somerville College, Oxford,
where she read Modern Languages, and worked as a teacher and social worker before becoming an editorial assistant for the Times Literary Supplement in 1974.
She is President of English PEN and was awarded a CBE in 1998.
She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and holds honorary doctorates from the universities of Southampton, Ulster, Dublin and York.
She is also a regular contributor of articles and reviews to various newspapers and magazines.
Her acclaimed biographies include Elizabeth Bowen: Portrait of a Writer, published in 1977; Edith Sitwell: A Unicorn Among Lions (1981), which won both the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize; and Rebecca West: A Life (1987).
Both Vita: The Life of V. Sackville-West (1983) and Trollope (1992) won the Whitbread Biography Award.
Victoria Glendinning is the author of three novels: The Grown-Ups (1989), the story of Leo Ulm, author, pundit and academic; Flight (2002), her most recent book, a novel of passion and betrayal set in the world of international business and Electricity (1995), the story of a Victorian girl embroiled in new experiences and a new technology.
It is set during the 1880s, focussing on lives being caught up in the excitement of the new phenomena of the age: women's suffrage, spiritualism and electricity itself.
Her relentlessly thorough research regarding the changes wrought by the Industrial Revolution and the electrifying of England make her an excellent person to present an overview of the revolutionary impact that changing a source of light can have on society.
Her sense of social background is informative and detailed, reflects the customs, sexual morés, coffee/tea-house culture and political and power fluctuations of a particular time.
Prizes and awards:
- 1981 Duff Cooper Memorial Prize Edith Sitwell: A Unicorn Among Lions
- 1981 James Tait Black Memorial Prize Edith Sitwell: A Unicorn Among Lions
- 1983 Whitbread Biography Award Vita: The Life of V. Sackville-West
- 1992 Whitbread Biography Award Trollope
- 1998 CBE
