Maggie Gee (novelist)
| Maggie Mary Gee OBE FRSL | |
|---|---|
| Born | Poole, Dorset, England, United Kingdom |
| Occupation | Novelist |
| Language | English |
| Nationality | English |
| Citizenship | United Kingdom |
| Education | Somerville College, Oxford |
| Alma mater | Wolverhampton Polytechnic (1980) |
| Notable awards | Granta Best of Young British Novelists (1983) |
| Spouse | Nicholas Rankin |
Maggie Mary Gee OBE FRSL (born 1948) is an English novelist. In 2012, she became a Professor of Creative Writing at Bath Spa University.
Gee was one of six women among the 20 writers on the Granta Best of Young British Novelists list in 1983, which she recalls as "a very good time for fiction."[1] She was the first female Chair of the Royal Society of Literature (RSL), 2004–08.
Life
Gee was born in Poole, Dorset. In her childhood, she moved to the Midlands, and later to Sussex. She was educated at state schools and later at Somerville College, Oxford (MA, B Litt). She then worked in publishing and had a research post at Wolverhampton Polytechnic, where she completed a doctorate on the 20th-century novel in 1980.
She has written twelve novels, a collection of short stories and a memoir. Gee is now one of the Vice-Presidents of the RSL and Professor of Creative Writing at Bath Spa University, where she shares an office with Professor Fay Weldon.[2] She has also served on the Society of Authors' management committee and the government's Public Lending Right committee. In 2016 she was elected a non-executive Director of ALCS. Her seventh novel, The White Family, was shortlisted for the 2003 Orange Prize and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. The first book-length study of her work, Mine Özyurt Kılıç's Maggie Gee: Writing the Condition of England Novel, was published in January 2013 by Bloomsbury Academic.
Gee writes in a broadly modernist tradition, in that her books have a strong overall sense of pattern and meaning, but her writing style is characterized by political and social awareness. She turns a satirical eye on contemporary society but is affectionate towards her characters and has an unironic 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 (first published in 1991), The Ice People (1998) and The Flood (2004) 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 in turn 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, poverty, and climate change. Her books also explore how humans as a species relate to non-human animals and to the natural world as a whole. Two of her books, The White Family (2002) and My Cleaner (2005), have racism as a central theme, dealt with as a tragedy in The White Family but as a comedy in My Cleaner. In 2009 she published My Driver, a second novel with many of the same characters as My Cleaner, but this time set in Uganda during a time of tension with neighboring DR Congo.
Gee's memoir, My Animal Life, was published in 2010.
Her novel Virginia Woolf in Manhattan was published by Telegram in 2014.
Gee lives in London with her husband, the writer and broadcaster Nicholas Rankin (author of Dead Man's Chest: Travels after Robert Louis Stevenson, Telegram from Guernica: The Extraordinary Life of George Steer, War Correspondent and Churchill's Wizards), and their daughter.
Gee was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2012 New Year Honours for services to literature.[3]
Bibliography
- Dying, In Other Words (Harvester, 1981). ISBN 978-0710800305
- Anthology of Writing Against War: For Life on Earth (editor) (University of East Anglia, 1982)
- The Burning Book (London: Faber and Faber, 1983). New edition 1985, ISBN 978-0571134175
- Light Years (London: Faber and Faber, 1985, re-issued by Flamingo, 1994, and by Saqi Books, 2005)
- Grace (London: Heinemann, 1988, Telegram, 2009)
- Where Are the Snows? (London: Heinemann, 1991, re-issued by Saqi Books, 2005)
- Lost Children (London: Flamingo, 1994)
- The Burning Book (London: Flamingo, 1994)
- How May I Speak in My Own Voice? Language and the Forbidden (Birkbeck College: The William Matthews Lecture, 1996)
- The Ice People (London: Richard Cohen Books, 1998, revised edn, Telegram, 2008). ISBN 9781846591389
- The White Family (London: Saqi Books, 2002); Telegram Books. 18 April 2012. ISBN 978-1-84659-137-2
- Diaspora City: The London New Writing Anthology (contributor) (London: Arcadia Books, 2003)
- The Flood (London: Saqi Books, 2004). ISBN 978-0863563157
- My Cleaner (London: Saqi Books, 2005). ISBN 9781846591327
- The Blue (short stories) (London: Saqi Books, 2006). ISBN 978-1846590139
- NW 15: The Anthology of New Writing, co-edited with Bernardine Evaristo (Granta/British Council, 2007)
- My Driver (Telegram, 2009). ISBN 9781846591334
- My Animal Life: A Memoir. Saqi. 12 August 2011. ISBN 978-1-84659-096-2.[4][5]
- Virginia Woolf in Manhattan (London: Telegram, 2014)
References
- ↑ Jonathan Derbyshire, "The Books Interview: Maggie Gee", New Statesman, 8 March 2010.
- ↑ Katie Allen. "Weldon and Hensher head to Bath Spa". The Bookseller. Retrieved 9 November 2012.
- ↑ The London Gazette: (Supplement) no. 60009. p. 10. 31 December 2011.
- ↑ Michèle Roberts, "My Animal Life", The Independent, 9 April 2010.
- ↑ Kathryn Hughes, "My Animal Life by Maggie Gee", The Guardian, 15 May 2010.
External links
- Özyurt Kiliç, Mine (December 2014). ""A sense of completeness, of understanding, enfolding all difference": an interview with Maggie Gee". Contemporary Women's Writing, Advance Access (Oxford Journals) 9 (2): 167. doi:10.1093/cww/vpu030.
- Derbyshire, Jonathan (8 March 2010). "The books interview: Maggie Gee ("My Animal Life")". New Statesman.
- Audio slideshow interview with Maggie Gee about The White Family on The Interview Online
- Video interview with Maggie Gee about The White Family on Meet the Author
- Video interview with Maggie Gee about The Blue on Meet the Author
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