Susanna Clarke

Did You Know?

• Clarke's short story 'The Wood at Midwinter' was published by Bloomsbury Publishing on 22 October 2024.
• Her short story 'John Uskglass and the Cumbrian Charcoal Burner' first appeared in her collection The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories.
• Clarke has published short stories in traditional press, newspapers, and via radio broadcast.

Biography

Susanna Clarke was born on November 1, 1959, in Nottingham, England, as the oldest child of a Methodist minister and his wife. Because her father moved frequently for his work, she grew up in several towns across northern England and Scotland, where she developed a love for the novels of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Charles Dickens, and Jane Austen. She went on to study philosophy, politics, and economics at St Hilda's College, Oxford, graduating in 1981. After college, she spent eight years in publishing, first at Quarto and then at Gordon Fraser. She then taught English as a foreign language for two years, working in Turin, Italy, and Bilbao, Spain. In 1992, she returned to England and settled for the rest of the year in County Durham, in a house overlooking the North Sea. It was there that she started writing her first novel, Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. The following year, she took a job editing cookbooks at Simon & Schuster in Cambridge, a position she held for a decade. The idea for her novel first came to her while teaching in Bilbao, when she had a waking dream of a man in eighteenth-century clothing, in a place like Venice, speaking to English tourists. She felt strongly that he had a magical background and that something had gone badly wrong. Around the same time, she had reread J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, which inspired her to try writing a fantasy novel about magic.