Portal:University of Oxford/Selected biography/19

Susanna Clarke (born 1959) is a British author best known for her debut novel Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (2004), an alternate history which won the Hugo Award for Best Novel. After studying at St Hilda's College, Oxford, Clarke worked in publishing and then taught English in Italy and in Spain. She began Jonathan Strange in 1993 and worked on it during her spare time. For the next decade, she published short stories from the Strange universe, but it was not until 2003 that Bloomsbury bought her manuscript and began work on its publication. The novel became a bestseller and won several awards. Two years later, she published a collection of her short stories, The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories (2006). Both Clarke's novel and her short stories are set in a magical England and written in a pastiche of the styles of 19th-century writers such as Jane Austen and Charles Dickens. While Strange focuses on the relationship of two men, Jonathan Strange and Gilbert Norrell, the stories in Ladies focus on the power women gain through magic. (more...)