Maggie Gee (novelist)
Maggie Mary Gee Granta Best of Young British Novelists (1983) | |
---|---|
Spouse | Nicholas Rankin |
Children | Rosa Rankin-Gee |
Maggie Mary Gee
Gee was one of six women among the 20 writers on the
Life
Gee was born in
She is a
Gee lived in London with her husband, the writer and broadcaster Nicholas Rankin (author of Dead Man's Chest: Travels after Robert Louis Stevenson, Telegram from Guernica: The Extraordinary Life of George Steer, War Correspondent and Churchill's Wizards), and their daughter Rosa Rankin-Gee, who is also a novelist.[5] Gee now lives in Ramsgate.[6][7]
Work
Gee has published 14 novels; a collection of short stories, and a memoir. Her seventh novel,
Gee writes in a broadly modernist tradition, in that her books have a strong overall sense of pattern and meaning, but her writing style is characterized by political and social awareness. She turns a satirical eye on contemporary society but is affectionate towards her characters and has an unironic sense of the beauty of the natural world. Her human beings are biological as well as social creatures partly because of the influence of science and in particular evolutionary biology on her thinking. Where Are the Snows (first published in 1991), The Ice People (1998) and The Flood (2004) have all dealt with the near or distant future.[10] She writes through male characters as often as she does through female characters.[8]
The individual human concerns that her stories address include the difficulties of resolving the conflict between total unselfishness, which often leads to secret unhappiness and resentment against the beneficiaries; and selfishness, which in turn can lead to the unhappiness of others, particularly of children. This is a typical quandary of late 20th- and early 21st-century women, but it is also a concern for privileged, wealthy, long-lived Western human beings as a whole, and widens into global concerns about wealth, poverty, and climate change. Her books also explore how humans as a species relate to non-human animals and the natural world as a whole. Two of her books, The White Family (2002) and
In 2010, Gee published My Animal Life, a memoir praised by Kathryn Hughes as "absorbing"[11] and about which Michèle Roberts wrote in The Independent: "While chronicling the successes (and pitfalls) of an artist's life, My Animal Life paints a fine, honest, complex portrait of an artist's mind."[12]
Gee is a Vice-President of the Royal Society of Literature and Professor of Creative Writing at Bath Spa University.[13] She has also served on the Society of Authors' management committee and the government's Public Lending Right committee.[8] Literary awards she has judged include the Booker Prize in 1989[14] and the Wellcome Book Prize in 2010.[15]
In the
Bibliography
- ISBN 9780710800305
- Anthology of Writing Against War: For Life on Earth (editor) (University of East Anglia, 1982)
- The Burning Book (London: Faber and Faber, 1983). New edition 1985, ISBN 9780571134175
- Light Years (London: Faber and Faber, 1985, re-issued by Flamingo, 1994, and by Telegram, 2005). ISBN 9780863568688
- Grace (London: Heinemann, 1988, ISBN 9781846590634
- Where Are the Snows? (London: Heinemann, 1991; re-issued by Telegram, 2005). ISBN 978-1846590016
- Lost Children (London: Flamingo, 1994). ISBN 9780006546870
- The Burning Book (London: Flamingo, 1994). ISBN 978-0006546160
- How May I Speak in My Own Voice? Language and the Forbidden (Birkbeck College: The William Matthews Lecture, 1996). ISBN 9780907904564
- ISBN 9781846591389
- ISBN 9781846591372
- Diaspora City: The London New Writing Anthology (contributor) (London: Arcadia Books, 2003). ISBN 9781900850759
- The Flood (London: Telegram, 2004). ISBN 9780863563157
- ISBN 9781846591327
- The Blue (short stories) (London: Telegram, 2006). ISBN 9781846590139
- NW 15: The Anthology of New Writing, co-edited with ISBN 9781862079328
- ISBN 9781846591334
- My Animal Life: A Memoir. Telegram. 12 August 2011. ISBN 978-1-84659-096-2.
- Virginia Woolf in Manhattan (London: Telegram, 2014). ISBN 9781846591990
- Blood (London: Fentum Press, 2019). ISBN 9781909572126
- Virginia Woolf in Manhattan. Expanded US edition (London and New York: Fentum Press, 2019). ISBN 9781909572102
- The Red Children (London: Telegram, 2022). ISBN 9781846592133
References
- ^ "GEE, Maggie (Mary)". Encyclopedia.com.
- ^ Derbyshire, Jonathan (8 March 2010). "The Books Interview: Maggie Gee". New Statesman.
- ^ a b c "Professor Maggie Gee | Professor of Creative Writing". Bath Spa University. Retrieved 15 August 2023.
- ^ Susan Brown; Patricia Clements; Isobel Grundy, eds. (2006). "Maggie Gee entry". Orlando: Women's Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present. Cambridge University Press Online. Retrieved 2 November 2020.
- ^ O'Keeffe, Alice (15 June 2014). "Maggie Gee interview: 'Writing novels is a ghastly profession'". The Guardian.
- ^ Gee, Maggie (10 February 2019), "Dammit, Thanet, I love you: how the southeast tip of England is enjoying a genteel renaissance", The Sunday Times. Retrieved 11 February 2019.
- ^ Bailes, Kathy (31 March 2022). "Ramsgate's leading role in new tale of migration and community by town author Maggie Gee". The Isle of Thanet News. Retrieved 15 August 2023.
- ^ a b c d "Maggie Gee". British Council. Retrieved 16 September 2016.
- ^ "Maggie Gee: Writing the Condition-of-England Novel". Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. Retrieved 16 September 2016.
- ^ Page, Benedicte (16 October 2003). "Maggie Gee: A playful apocalypse". The Bookseller. Retrieved 15 August 2023.
- ^ Hughes, Kathryn (15 May 2010). "My Animal Life by Maggie Gee". The Guardian.
- ^ Roberts, Michèle (9 April 2010). "My Animal Life". The Independent.
- ^ Allen, Katie (28 September 2012). "Weldon and Hensher head to Bath Spa". The Bookseller. Retrieved 9 November 2012.
- ^ "The Booker Prize 1989 | Kazuo Ishiguro". The Booker Prizes. Retrieved 15 August 2023.
- ^ "Maggie Gee | Novelist and academic". Wellcome Book Prize. Retrieved 15 August 2023.
- ^ "No. 60009". The London Gazette (Supplement). 31 December 2011. p. 10.
External links
- Özyurt Kiliç, Mine (December 2014). ""A sense of completeness, of understanding, enfolding all difference": an interview with Maggie Gee". Contemporary Women's Writing, Advance Access. 9 (2): 167–181. hdl:11376/2924.
- Audio slideshow interview about The White Family on The Interview Online
- Video interview about The White Family on Meet the Author
- Video interview about The Blue on Meet the Author
- Maggie Gee at Library of Congress, with 17 library catalogue records
- Georgia de Chamberet, "Podcast LIVE | In conversation with Maggie Gee, author", BookBlast, 16 April 2019.