Somerville College, Oxford

Penelope Fitzgerald was a Booker Prize-winning English novelist, poet, essayist and biographer. In 2008, The Times included her in a list of "The 50... greatest British writers since 1945". She was the daughter of Punch editor Edmund Knox and Christina Hicks, one of the first woman students at Oxford. She was the niece of theologian and crime writer Ronald Knox, cryptographer Dilly Knox and Bible scholar Wilfred Knox. Fitzgerald later wrote, She was educated at Wycombe Abbey and Somerville College, Oxford; she worked for the BBC during World War II. In 1941, she married Desmond Fitzgerald, an Irish soldier; they had three children, a son and two daughters. In the 1960s, she taught at the Italia Conti Academy, a drama school and at Queen's Gate School for Girls; she also worked in a bookshop in Southwold, Suffolk. For a time she lived in Battersea on the Thames, on a houseboat that reportedly sank twice. She launched her literary career in 1975, at the age of 58, when she published a biography of Pre-Raphaelite artist Edward Burne-Jones .
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Dame Iris Murdoch DBE was an Irish-born British author and philosopher, best known for her novels about political and social questions of good and... evil, sexual relationships, morality, and the power of the unconscious. Her first published novel, Under the Net, was selected in 2001 by the editorial board as one of Modern Library's 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. In 1987, she was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire. In 2008, The Times named Murdoch among their list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945". Jean Iris Murdoch was born in Phibsborough, Dublin, Ireland, on 15 July 1919. Her father, Wills John Hughes Murdoch, came from a mainly Presbyterian sheep farming family from Hillhall, County Down, and her mother, Irene Alice Richardson, who had trained as a singer until Iris was born, was from a middle class, Church of Ireland family from Dublin. When Iris was very young, her parents moved to London, where her father worked in the Civil Service.
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Nina Bawden CBE is a British novelist and children's writer. Bawden grew up in Ilford in "a rather nasty housing estate that [her] mother despised".... Her mother was a teacher and her father a member of the Royal Marines. After World War II broke out, she was evacuated at the age of fourteen to Aberdare, Wales. She spent school holidays at a farm in Shropshire along with her mother and her brothers. She attended Somerville College, Oxford, where she gained a degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics. Bawden married Austen Kark, a managing director of the BBC World Service, in 1954. In 2002 Bawden was badly injured in the Potters Bar rail crash, in which Kark was killed. She currently lives in London and Nauplion, Greece. Bawden's novels include Carrie's War, The Peppermint Pig, and The Witch's Daughter. A number of her works have been dramatised by BBC Children's television, and many have been translated into various languages. In 2010 Bawden was nominated for the Lost Man Booker Prize for her novel The Birds on the Trees. She and Shirley Hazzard were the only living nominees out of the six shortlisted; the award went to J.G.
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Ann Schlee FRSL is a novelist in England. As a child, Ann was brought up in the United States by her mother and grandparents until the end of the... Second World War. After World War II, she began to settle in Cairo, Egypt, with her parents. They later moved to Sudan and Eritrea. Inter alia, she attended boarding school in England and later studied at Somerville College, Oxford. Schlee has spent much of her writing career in London being quite active in the 1970s to the 1990s. She won the 1980 Guardian Award for Children's Fiction for her novel The Vandal. Her novel Rhine Journey was shortlisted for the 1981 Booker Prize. She was elected to be a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1997. Ann Schlee lives with her husband, the artist Nick Schlee, in Berkshire with their four children.
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