Kate Atkinson | Signed First Editions

Kate Atkinson MBE FRSL

Kate Atkinson was born in York in December 1951 and spent much of her early adult life doing what many writers do before writing becomes possible: working her way through a miscellaneous run of jobs, from home help to legal secretary to teacher, while nursing ambitions she had no clear path to realising. She had studied English at Dundee University, attempted a doctorate, and failed at the viva. None of it particularly deterred her. She was in her thirties when she began publishing short stories, and past forty by the time her first novel arrived.

That first novel turned out to be rather remarkable. Behind the Scenes at the Museum (1995), set partly in York and drawing on the texture of the city’s domestic and commercial life, tells the story of Ruby Lennox, whose account of her own childhood gradually uncovers the darker history her family has buried across two world wars. It won both the Whitbread First Novel Prize and the Whitbread Book of the Year, the latter causing a certain amount of literary controversy: the debut by this previously unknown writer had been chosen over Salman Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh in the Novel category. It was a bold call, and it held up.
The novels that followed experimented restlessly with form, narrative structure, and time. Human Croquet (1997) and Emotionally Weird (2000) were playful, formally inventive, and not always easy to categorise. Then in 2004 came Case Histories, the first novel featuring Jackson Brodie, a former police officer turned Edinburgh-based private investigator, whose cases have a habit of entangling several apparently unrelated lives. The Brodie series, which eventually ran to six novels and sits squarely within literary fiction while doing everything a crime novel should, became a BBC television series starring Jason Isaacs, giving Atkinson a much larger general audience than literary prizes alone can deliver.

The work that cemented her reputation among serious readers, however, came later. Life After Life (2013), in which the protagonist Ursula Todd dies and is repeatedly reborn into 1910, living out different versions of a twentieth-century life with each new iteration, is a novel of extraordinary ambition and control. It won the Costa Novel Award, the South Bank Sky Arts Literature Prize, was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, and was voted Book of the Year by independent booksellers on both sides of the Atlantic. In 2022 it became a BBC television series, with Thomasin McKenzie in the central role. Its companion novel, A God in Ruins (2015), following Ursula’s brother Teddy through the Second World War and its aftermath, won the Costa Novel Award in turn, making Atkinson the first writer to win that prize three times. She has asked her publishers to stop submitting her books for awards, which is the kind of thing only someone who has won enough of them can comfortably say.

Transcription (2018) and Shrines of Gaiety (2022) maintained her run of Sunday Times bestsellers, the latter a vivid novel set in London’s 1920s nightclub world. Her most recent Brodie novel, Death at the Sign of the Rook (2024), was an instant number one bestseller. She was appointed MBE in 2011 and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She lives in Edinburgh.