Susanna Clarke
1959
Susanna Clarke is an alternate history, fantasy and science fiction author from Cambridge England. She was born in 1959 in Nottingham and spent much of her childhood between several towns in Scotland and Northern England. She went to college in Oxford at St Hilda’s College before she went on to work in various areas of publishing at “Quarto” and “Gordon Fraser.” In 1990, she relocated to Turin to become a teacher of English to executives of the Fiat Motor Company. She moved to Bilbao and taught English there for several months in 1991 before coming back to England in 1992. It was while she was living in Durham County that she began writing the manuscript for “Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell.” While she was working on her novel, she took a job with the Simon and Schuster publishing company in Cambridge where she was an editor for the cookery list. Apart from her novels, she also published seven novellas and short stories that have been featured in several American anthologies. Her short fiction “Mr. Simonelli or The Fairy Widower” made the shortlist for the 2001 World Fantasy Award. She currently lives with her partner Colin Greenland the reviewer and novelist in Cambridge.