Dame Penelope Margaret Lively, DBE, FRSL is a prolific, popular and critically acclaimed author of fiction for both children and adults. She has won both the Booker Prize for British novels and the Carnegie Medal for British children's books. Personal Penelope Low was born in Cairo in 1933. She spent her early childhood in Egypt before being sent to boarding school in England at the age of twelve. She read Modern History at St Anne's College, Oxford. She married the academic Jack Lively in 1957 and they lived in Swansea and Oxford, among other places. He died in 1998, and Penelope Lively now lives in north London. Writer Penelope Lively's writing is strongly influenced by her appreciation of the sweeping social changes in Britain during the twentieth century. In this she matches her peers Margaret Drabble, Nina Bawden, A. S. Byatt and others. Children's fiction She first achieved success with children's fiction. Her first book, Astercote, was published by Heinemann in 1970. It is a low fantasy novel set in a Cotswolds village and the neighbouring woodland site of a medieval village wiped out by Plague. Since then she has published more than twenty books for children, achieving particular recognition with The Ghost of Thomas Kempe and A Stitch in Time. For the former she won the 1973 Carnegie Medal from the Library Association, recognising the year's best children's book by a British subject. For the latter she won the 1976 Whitbread Children's Book Award. The three novels feature local history, roughly 600, 300, and 100 years past, in ways that approach time slip but do not posit travel to the past. Adult works Her first novel for adults, The Road to Lichfield, was published in 1977 and made the shortlist for the Booker Prize. She repeated the feat in 1984 with According to Mark, and won the 1987 prize for Moon Tiger, which tells the story of a woman's tempestuous life as she lies dying in a hospital bed. As with all of her fiction, Moon Tiger is marked by a close attention to the power of memory, the impact of the past upon the present, and the tensions between 'official' and personal histories. She explored the same themes more explicitly in her nonfiction works including A House Unlocked (2001) and Oleander, Jacaranda: A Childhood Perceived (1994), a memoir of her Egyptian childhood. Beside novels and short stories, Penelope Lively has also written radio and television scripts, presented a radio programme and contributed reviews and articles to various newspapers and journals. Honours She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She is also a Vice President of the Friends of the British Library. She was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 1989, Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 2001, and Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) in the 2012 New Year Honours for services to literature. Image source and licensing details: http://wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Penelope_Lively.JPGThis is a synthesized speech reading of the Wikipedia article "Penelope Lively" and is intended primarily for blind and visually impaired individuals who can not view Wikipedia. This video can also be used for mobile users who wish to listen to Wikipedia articles on the go, or by those who wish to learn a second language by reading the captions in that language while listening in English. Original article available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penelope_Lively All text from Wikipedia is licensed under CC-BY-SA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reusing_Wikipedia_content "You are free ... to make commercial use of the work": http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ Text-to-speech synthesized from FestVox, which permits commercial use: "no restrictions on its use (commercial or otherwise)" http://festvox.org/festival/downloads.html Original article available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penelope_Lively Note: all these licenses permit commercial use, and therefore we are permitted to monetize videos derived from these contents.

• published: 25 Aug 2013
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