Kate Atkinson

Kate Atkinson (born December 20, 1951, York, England) is a British short-story writer, playwright, and novelist whose works are known for their complicated plots, experimental form, and often eccentric characters.

Atkinson received her early education at a private preparatory school and later the Queen Anne Grammar School for Girls in York. An avid reader from childhood, she studied English literature at the University of Dundee, where she earned a master’s degree in 1974. She remained at Dundee to study postmodern American fiction for a doctorate. Though she was denied the degree, her studies of the postmodern stylistic elements of American writers such as Kurt Vonnegut influenced her later work.

Throughout the late 1970s and for much of the ’80s, Atkinson held various jobs, few of which enabled her to make use of her literary interests. In 1981–82, however, she took up short-story writing, finding the brief narrative form an effective outlet for her creative energy. Later that decade, her short story “In China” won a competition sponsored by Woman’s Own magazine. The prize inspired her to write fiction for other publications, including Good Housekeeping and the Daily Mail. In 1993 her short story “Karmic Mothers—Fact or Fiction?,” about two women hospitalized for their suicide attempts and recovering next to a maternity unit, won the Ian St. James Award; the story was adapted for television in 1997.

Atkinson’s first novel was the tragicomedy Behind the Scenes at the Museum (1995), which evolved from a series of previously written short stories. The novel centres on Ruby Lennox, whose narrative of self-discovery ultimately becomes the story of her family’s survival through two world wars. Atkinson interspersed the text with “footnotes”—chapter-long asides by family members, whose flashbacks reveal dark secrets hidden beneath the family facade. The work won the 1995 Book of the Year and First Novel Whitbread Book Awards (later renamed the Costa Book Awards).

In her second novel, Human Croquet (1997), Atkinson employed nonchronological flashbacks and magic realism to bring a mythical quality to the main character, Isobel Fairfax, and her family’s past. Atkinson’s inclination to experiment with literary device featured prominently in her next novel, Emotionally Weird (2000), in which she assigned different fonts to certain characters and settings. The same year as that book’s publication, Atkinson’s first full-length play, Abandonment, premiered at the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh. She subsequently began writing a series of crime thrillers that featured private investigator Jackson Brodie. Case Histories (2004), the first book in the series, made the short list for a Whitbread Book Award and later lent its name to the series adaptation for television, where the role of Brodie was played by British actor Jason Isaacs. Other books in the series included One Good Turn (2006), When Will There Be Good News? (2008), Started Early, Took My Dog (2010), and Big Sky (2019).

Among Atkinson’s later critically acclaimed works was Life After Life (2013), a novel in which the protagonist, Ursula Todd, repeatedly dies and is reborn in the year 1910. In each new life, Ursula is confronted by different choices and situations that have the potential to alter the course of history. The novel was an unusual blend of science fiction and drama and was noted for its insightful portrayal of human nature. It was short-listed for the 2013 Women’s Prize for Fiction and was awarded the 2013 Costa Book Award for best novel. A God in Ruins (2015) traces the life of RAF pilot Teddy Todd, Ursula’s brother, though it dispenses with the latter’s rebirths, instead taking a more starkly realistic approach to the narrative. In Transcription (2018) a woman must confront her past as a worker at MI5 during World War II. Post-war London served as the setting for Atkinson’s next book, Shrines of Gaiety (2022), a sprawling novel centring on a nightclub impresario who faces various threats to her empire.