Penelope Fitzgerald

Vocation

Notable

Family

English novelist, poet, essayist and biographer, who won the Booker Prize for 1979 with Offshore, a novel that takes place among residents of houseboats in Battersea in 1961. In 2008, The Times included her in a list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945". In 2012, The Observer named her final novel, The Blue Flower, as one of "the ten best historical novels". In 1942 she married Desmond Fitzgerald, whom she had met in 1940 while they were both at Oxford. They had three children, a son, Valpy, and two daughters, Tina and Maria. The couple lived for eleven years in a council flat—public housing. In order to provide for her family, during the 1960s she taught at the Italia Conti Academy, a drama school, and at Queen's Gate School, where her pupils included Camilla Shand (later Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall.) She also taught at a posh cram school, where her pupils included Anna Wintour, Edward St Aubyn, and Helena Bonham Carter (in fact, she continued to teach until she was seventy years old). She died on 28 April 2000, aged 83, in London, England. Link to Wikipedia biography