Jane Gardam
Jane Gardam was born in North Yorkshire in 1928, where her father was a teacher. She moved to London after the Second World War to read English at Bedford College. Her first book, A Long Way from Verona, was written for children and published in 1971, when she was in her early 40s.
Jane’s first novel for adults, God on the Rocks, set in the 1930s, was published in 1978 and adapted for television in 1992. It won the Prix Baudelaire in 1989 and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction. Jane was the only writer to have been awarded the Whitbread Award (later the Costa Award) twice, for The Hollow Land in 1981 in the children’s category and The Queen of the Tambourine in the novel category in 1991.
Her work was shortlisted for the Booker, Orange and Folio prizes, and in 1999 Jane was awarded the Heywood Hill Literary Prize and an OBE in 2009, both in recognition of a distinguished literary career. She was also the recipient of the Charleston-Chichester Award for a Lifetime’s Excellence in Short Fiction, and an edition of her best short stories, The Stories, was published by Little Brown.
Jane died in 2025 at the age of 96. She had legions of admirers, including Ian McEwan, who called her “a treasure of English contemporary writing”.
