Sally Beauman
| Sally Beauman | |
|---|---|
| Born |
Sally V Kinsey-Miles 25 July 1944 Totnes, Devon, England |
| Occupation | Journalist, writer |
| Language | English |
| Period | 1976–present |
| Genre | Fiction |
| Spouse |
Christopher Beauman, Alan Howard (2004–2015; his death) |
| Children | James Howard |
Sally Beauman (born 25 July 1944) is an English journalist and writer, author of eight widely translated and best-selling novels.
Biography
Personal life
Sally Beauman, née Kinsey-Miles, was born in Totnes, Devon, England.[1] She was educated at Redland High School and Girton College, Cambridge.
She was married to Christopher Beauman, an economist. She later married actor Alan Howard, whom she met in 1970 while interviewing him for The Telegraph Magazine.[2] They have one son and two grandchildren.
Career
She worked for two years as a critic and contributing editor for New York magazine. In 1970 she was the first recipient of the Catherine Pakenham Award for her journalism, and at the age of 24 edited Queen Magazine, also becoming Arts Editor of the Sunday Telegraph Magazine. She worked as an investigative journalist, interviewer and critic for many leading publications in Britain and the USA, including "New York" magazine, who gave her her first assignment (interviewing Norman Mailer), and "The New Yorker". It was an article about the work of Daphne du Maurier in this magazine that eventually led to her writing "Rebecca's Tale", her companion novel to du Maurier's "Rebecca".
Her first work of non-fiction was Henry V (Pergamon Press, 1976), a study of the Royal Shakespeare Company's 1975 Centenary production. In 1982, to coincide with the opening of the Barbican Theatre in London, the Oxford University Press published her widely acclaimed study of The Royal Shakespeare Company: A History of Ten Decades (ISBN 0192122096), chronicling the turbulent history of what was to become the RSC from its first founding as a small seasonal theatre in Stratford upon Avon in 1879.
She then began writing fiction, and received a record-breaking advance for her controversial first novel, Destiny, which became an international best seller. Her subsequent novels include Dark Angel, in which a country-house and a family is almost destroyed by the orphan child it has taken in; Rebecca's Tale and The Landscape of Love, a novel with multiple narrators that examines the post-1960's lives of three very different, and antagonistic sisters.
Her novel The Visitors, set in Egypt and Cambridge in the 1920s, was published to considerable acclaim in the UK and the USA in 2014. It concerns the discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb in the Valley of the Kings in 1922, the subterfuge that attended it, and the political turmoil it caused.
Bibliography
Non-fiction
- The Royal Shakespeare Company's Centenary Production of Henry V (1976)
- The Royal Shakespeare Company: A History of Ten Decades (1982)
Novels
- Destiny (1987)
- Dark Angel (1990)
- Lovers and Liars (1994)
- Danger Zones (1996)
- Sextet (1997)
- Rebecca's Tale (2001)
- The Landscape of Love (2005), titled The Sisters Mortland in USA
- The Visitors (2014)
References and sources
External links
- Sally Beauman's top 10 novels with a powerful sense of place, The Guardian
- Linda Grant's review of Rebecca's Tale
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