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Miranda Carter was educated at St. Paul's Girls' School and Exeter College, Oxford. She worked as a publisher and journalist before beginning research on her biography of Anthony Blunt in 1994. She lives in London with her husband and two sons. Anthony Blunt: His Lives (2001), her first book, won the Royal Society of Literature Award and the Orwell Prize, and was shortlisted for many other prizes, including the Guardian First Book Award and the Whitbread Biography Award. In the US it was chosen by the New York Times Book Review as one of the seven best books of 2002. Her second book was George, Nicholas and Wilhelm: Three Royal Cousins and the Road to World War I, which was shortlisted for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize (Biography) in 2010.
Miranda is married with two sons and lives in London.
Miranda J. Carter's website
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You have written two award winning works of history/biography. What prompted the shift to fiction?
In 2010, I'd written two big fat non-fiction tomes and it had taken me fifteen years (and I'd had two kids). I realized I wasn't ready to go back into a hole and spend six or seven years patiently putting together a book in which I had to fact check every single phrase — it can be fascinating but also very draining. I wanted a new challenge, to write something faster and breezier, that used my appetite for history and research as a background but let me play around with the foreground, to see whether I could create characters and a plot. I love crime novels and for about ten years I had secretly harboured a longing to write a thriller about a detective from the early Victorian era, a brilliantly clever man from a really poor background who could see the whole Victorian world from top to bottom, and I had a whole bunch of settings I wanted to put him in. This just seemed the right moment to start.
What is the story you tell in The Strangler Vine?
I initially thought it was a conspiracy thriller but without me quite realizing it, it turned into a sort of road movie/adventure story. It's about two ...
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Eleanor Catton is the author of the international bestseller The Luminaries, winner of the Man Booker Prize and a Governor General's Literary Award. Her debut novel, The Rehearsal, won the Betty Trask Award, was short-listed ... (more)
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