From virtually the outset of her career as a novelist, Penelope Fitzgerald's work has attracted serious critical attention. Her second novel, The Bookshop (1978), was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, which is Britain's most valuable literary award, worth £10,000 to the winner. She won the Booker Prize in 1980 with her third novel, Offshore (1979). Her writing couples a traditionally moral humanist approach with a supple, spare style; her novels are short, but not slight.
Fitzgerald sees herself as an encouragement to late starters--she was sixty-one when her first novel, The Golden Child (1977), was published. Born in Lincoln, England, in 1916, to Edmund Valpy and Christina Hicks Knox, she grew up in a literary environment--her father was the editor of Punch magazine, and her uncle, Ronald Knox, was a translator of the Bible and a writer of detective stories. She has written a biography of all four Knox brothers (1977), and feels that the quality she shares with them is that they are all, in her words "understatement people." She read English at Somerville College, Oxford, where she received a degree with first-class honors in 1939, and married Desmond Fitzgerald in 1941.
