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Stevie Smith (1902-71) lived in Palmers Green, London, and for much of her life worked as a secretary for the magazine publishers Sir George Newnes and Sir Neville Pearson. Her first book, Novel on Yellow Paper, appeared in 1936, and her final collection of poems, Scorpion, was published posthumously in 1972. In 1966 she received a Cholmondeley Award and in 1969 was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry. Hermione Lee was the President of Wolfson College Oxford from 2008 to 2017 and is a retired professor of English Literature. She has taught at the Universities of Liverpool, York and Oxford, where she held the Goldsmiths' Chair in English from 1998 to 2008. Her work includes acclaimed biographies, all published by Chatto & Windus, of Virginia Woolf (1996), Edith Wharton (2006) and Penelope Fitzgerald (2013, winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Biography). She has also published books on Elizabeth Bowen, Willa Cather and Phillip Roth, and she has written about life-writing, in Body Parts: Essays on Life-Writing (2005), Biography: a Very Short Introduction (2009), and (co-edited with Kate Kennedy), a collection called Lives of Houses (2020). In 2013 she was made a Dame for services to literature. She lives in Oxford and Yorkshire. |
