Elizabeth Bowen

Victoria Glendinning was born in the north of England and read French and Spanish at Oxford. Her first book was A Suppressed Cry, a family memoir about her Quaker great-aunt. She has written biographies of Edith Sitwell (which won the James Tait Black Award and the Duff Cooper Prize), Vita Sackville-West (Whitbread Prize for Biography), Rebecca West, Anthony Trollope (Whitbread Prize for Biography), Jonathan Swift, and Leonard Woolf. She co-edited Mothers and Sons with her son Matthew Glendinning, and has published three novels, The Grown-Ups, Electricity, and Flight. She reviews books for national newspapers and journals, has been a judge of the W. H. Smith Prize and other literary awards, and chair of the judges of the Booker Prize. From 2000-03 she was president of English PEN. She is an Honorary Fellow of Somerville College, Oxford, and was awarded a CBE in 1998.