PERHAPS A GIFT VOUCHER FOR MUM?: MOTHER'S DAY
Muriel Spark, DBE, C.Litt., was born in Edinburgh in 1918 and educated in Scotland. A poet and novelist, she also wrote children's books, radio plays, the comedy Doctors of Philosophy and biographies of nineteenth-century literary figures, including Mary Shelley and Emily Bronte. Muriel Spark has garnered international praise and many awards, including the David Cohen Prize for Literature, the Ingersoll T.S. Eliot Award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the Boccaccio Prize for European Literature, the Gold Pen Award, the first Enlightenment Award and the Italia Prize for dramatic radio. She died in 2006.
* I am dazzled by The Bachelors. It is the cleverest and most elegant of all Mrs Spark's clever and elegant books -- EVELYN WAUGH * My admiration for Spark's contribution to world literature knows no bounds. She was peerless, sparkling, inventive and intelligent - the creme de la creme -- IAN RANKIN * Muriel Spark's novels linger in the mind as brilliant shards, decisive as a smashed glass is decisive -- JOHN UPDIKE New Yorker * The care with which she uses words is matched by a gloriously carefree attitude. It's all part of her sanity, her breezy authorial self-confidence; and because of this I think that reading a blast of her prose every morning is a far more restorative way to start a day than a shot of espresso Daily Telegraph * A wholly original presence in modern literature -- ANDREW MOTION * A profoundly serious comic writer whose wit advances, never undermines or diminishes, her ideas New York Times Book Review * She has a receptive and wholly distinctive genius -- A N WILSON Spectator * Spark is a natural, a paradigm of that rare sort of artist from whom work of the highest quality flows as elementally as current through a circuit New Yorker
