Spark, Muriel (1918–2006)

Scottish-born novelist. Her early novels are mostly dark and witty fantasies, focusing on social misfits, such as feature in The Comforters (1957) (her first novel), The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961), The Girls of Slender Means (1963), and A Far Cry from Kensington (1988). Blacker satire is found in Memento Mori (1959), The Mandelbaum Gate (1965), The Driver's Seat (1970), and later novels.

Other works include Collected Poems (1967), The Collected Stories (1994), and the novels Symposium (1990), Realities and Dreams (1996), and Aiding and Abetting (2000). An autobiography up to 1957, Curriculum Vitae was published in 1992.

Spark was born in Edinburgh, lived for a time in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), and worked for political intelligence in London during World War II. She was editor of the Poetry Review 1947–49. Her first published work was a critical biography of the writer Mary Shelley (1951). She was encouraged to embark upon fiction after winning the Observer short-story competition in 1951 and her conversion to Catholicism in 1954. She moved to Italy in 1967 and continued to write poetry and novels. She was made a DBE in 1993. In 1997 she won the British Literature Prize.