Biography
Novelist Alice Thomas Ellis (Anna Margaret Haycraft) was born in Liverpool in 1932.
She grew up in north Wales and was educated at the Liverpool School of Art. She worked as an editor for the publishers Duckworth and as a journalist. She wrote for The Universe (1989-91), The Catholic Herald and The Oldie, and wrote the 'Home Life' column in The Spectator (1985-9). She became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1999.
Her early fiction includes The Sin Eater (1977), which won an Arts Council of Wales Literature Award, The Birds of the Air (1980), The 27th Kingdom (1982), which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction, and The Other Side of the Fire (1983). The 'Summerhouse' trilogy consists of The Clothes in the Wardrobe (1987), The Skeleton in the Cupboard (1988) and The Fly in the Ointment (1989), adapted for television in 1992. Later fiction includes Pillars of Gold (1992), The Evening of Adam (1994), a collection of short stories, and Fairy Tale (1996), a mystery story set in rural Wales.
Unexplained Laughter (1985) won the Yorkshire Post Book Award (Book of the Year) and The Inn at the Edge of the World (1990) won a Writers' Guild Award (Best Fiction). She also wrote a volume of memoir, A Welsh Childhood (1990), and a book about the Catholic church, The Serpent on the Rock: A Personal View of Christianity (1994). A Gallimaufry of Books and Cooks (2004) is an examination of cookery through the ages.
Alice Thomas Ellis died in March 2005.
