Penelope Lively
Penelope Lively
Dame Penelope Margaret Lively DBE FRSLis a British writer of fiction for both children and adults. She has won both the Booker Prizeand the Carnegie Medal for British children's books...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionChildren's Author
Date of Birth17 March 1933
block grief eye
The place didn't look the same but it felt the same; sensations clutched and transformed me. I stood outside some concrete and plate-glass tower-block, picked a handful of eucalyptus leaves from a branch, crushed them in my hand, smelt, and tears came to my eyes. Sixty-seven-year-old Claudia, on a pavement awash with packaged American matrons, crying not in grief but in wonder that nothing is ever lost, that everything can be retrieved, that a lifetime is not linear but instant. That, inside the head, everything happens at once.
curiosity knows getting-to-know-someone
Getting to know someone else involves curiosity about where they have come from, who they are.
eye age youth
In old age, you realise that while you're divided from your youth by decades, you can close your eyes and summon it at will. As a writer it puts one at a distinct advantage.
spring childhood church
I can remember the lush spring excitement of language in childhood. Sitting in church, rolling it around my mouth like marbles--tabernacle and pharisee and parable, tresspass and Babylon and covenant.
history natural circumstances
History unravels; circumstances, following their natural inclination, prefer to remain ravelled.
mind want sparks
You have this comet trail of your own lived life, sparks from which arrive in the head all the time, whether you want them or not - life has been lived but it is still all going on, in the mind for better and for worse.
money people doe
People die, but money never does.
writing fiction mixtures
I'm writing another novel and I know what I'm going to do after, which may be something more like this again, maybe some strange mixture of fiction and non-fiction.
different london revolutionary
I can walk about London and see a society that seems an absolutely revolutionary change from the 1950s, that seems completely and utterly different, and then I can pick up on something where you suddenly see that it's not.
writing fiction writing-fiction
You learn a lot, writing fiction.
climate novel
Every novel generates its own climate, when you get going.
writing wells
I didn't write anything until I was well over 30.
kings grateful agnostic
I'm now an agnostic but I grew up on the King James version, which I'm eternally grateful for.
photography past bombs
The Photograph is concerned with the power that the past has to interfere with the present: the time bomb in the cupboard.