Margaret Drabble was born in England in 1939. She received a Bachelor of Arts degree in English from Newnham College, Cambridge and then worked as an actress including for the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford-upon-Avon. Her first novel, A Summer Birdcage, was published in 1963. Her early work touched on then taboo subjects including childbirth and abortion.
Drabble has published twenty novels including The Millstone published in 1965, The Radiant Way published in 1987, The Peppered Moth published in 2001, The Pure Gold Baby published in 2013 and The Dark Flood Rises published in 2016. She has also wrote various works of biography, non-fiction and short fiction. She was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1980.
Drabble delivered the Beatty Lecture on March 1, 1994, titled “The Corpse in the Garden: Concealements and Disclosures in Fiction and Biography”.
Image: ƬƵ University Archives