Lively, Penelope Margaret (1933– )

English writer. She has written many novels for children (A Stitch in Time (1976) won the Whitbread Literary Award) and, from 1977, for adults (Moon Tiger (1987) won the Booker Prize). Her fiction is characterized by an absorption in the influence of the past on the present.

Born in Cairo, Egypt, Lively was sent to school in England and graduated from St Anne's College, Oxford University. The childhood memoir Oleander Jacaranda (1994) recalls her early days in Egypt, but her fiction is often set in Oxfordshire. Her children's novels often have a supernatural element; for example, The Ghost of Thomas Kempe (1973; Carnegie Medal) wittily explores the clash between the 17th and 20th centuries. Her adult novels pursue the influence of surviving memory – architectural, topographical, and pictorial – and include Cleopatra's Sister (1993), Heat Wave (1996), Beyond the Blue Mountains (1997), and The Photograph (2003).