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 The Writers
Muriel Spark
1918 - 2006
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Biography
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Muriel Spark was born Muriel Sarah Camberg in Edinburgh in 1918 to a Scottish father and an English mother. She was educated at the Edinburgh
James Gillespie's School for Girls - an experience which undoubtedly inspired
the representation of Edinburgh public school life in The Prime of Miss Jean
Brodie. She was a talented student and at age 12 received the Walter Scott
prize for a poem entitled 'Out of a Book'. After leaving school, Spark took a
course in précis writing at the Heriot-Watt College in Edinburgh. She
later taught English as a means to finance secretarial training.
In 1937, Muriel Camberg married Sydney Oswald Spark and they had a son, Samuel, known as Robin.
For several years of her marriage Spark lived in Central Africa. Spark's marriage later ended
in divorce.
During the Second World War, Spark was conscripted to the Political Intelligence
Department of the British Foreign Office where she worked as a propagandist for
the war effort. After the war she lived in London, where she began her literary
career. She became General Secretary of The Poetry society, edited The Poetry Review 1947 -9 and wrote studies of Mary
Shelley, John Masefield and the Bronte sisters. In 1952 she published her first
book of poetry, a collection The Fanfarlo and Other Verse but
it was her winning of the Observer prize for short fiction that finally inspired
her to write fiction full-time. Her first published novel, The Comforters (1957), was written three years after Spark converted to Roman Catholicism and
the novel was inspired by her studies on the Book of Job. Several critics agree
that her religious conversion was the central event of her life.
With the success of her early novels and in particular The Prime of Miss Jean
Brodie Spark was able to leave London and, in 1967, took up residence in Italy.
Over her long career Muriel Spark has received countless literary tributes and
honours. In 1971 she was awarded an honorary degree in literature from Strathclyde
University and has been similarly honoured by the Universities of Aberdeen, St
Andrews, Edinburgh, London, Oxford and The American University of Paris. Heriot-Watt, where she studied précis writing, accorded her an honorary doctorate in 1995. In 1993, Spark was made a Dame of the British Empire and a Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres (France) and, in 1997, she received the David Cohen British Literature
Prize for Lifetime Achievement.
Dame Muriel Spark died at her home in Tuscany in April, 2006.
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