Kate Atkinson Biography
Kate Atkinson was born in York, England in 1951 and studied English
Literature at Dundee University in Scotland. After graduating in 1974, she
researched a postgraduate doctorate on American Literature. She later taught at
Dundee University and began writing short stories in 1981. She started writing
for women's magazines after winning the 1986 Woman's Own Short Story
Competition.
Her first novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum (1995), won the 1995
Whitbread Book of the Year award. Set in Yorkshire, the book has been adapted
for radio, theater and TV. This was followed by Human Croquet (1977),
Abandonment (2000), Emotionally Weird (2000), Not the End of the
World (2002), Case Histories (2004), One Good Turn (2006),
When Will There Be Good News (2008), and Started Early, Took My Dog (2011). The last four all feature former
private detective Jackson Brodie.
She has written two plays for the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh: Nice
(1996), and Abandonment, which premiered as part of the Edinburgh
Festival in August 2000. She currently lives in Edinburgh and is an occasional
contributor to newspapers and magazines.
Whatever genre Atkinson writes in, her books tend to touch on the themes of love
and loss, and how to carry on, always presented with a psychological astuteness
and wicked sense of humor. Her books tend to be populated by odd, sometimes
amoral, and generally dysfunctional misfits who become credible by dint of being
so fully rendered.
Her books have frequently been described as comedies of manners; that is to say
a comedy that represents the complex and sophisticated code of behavior current
in fashionable circles of society, where appearances count for more than true
moral character. A comedy of manners tends to reward its clever and unscrupulous
characters rather than punish their immorality. The humor of a comedy of manners
relies on verbal wit and repartee. This form of writing flourished in England
with authors such as Jane Austen, Samuel Coleridge, Oscar Wilde and Noel Coward.
Copyright BookBrowse.com 2008.
This biography was last updated on 09/26/2008.
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