Piranesi (Clarke) - Author Bio

Author Bio
• Birth—November 1, 1959
• Where—Nottingham, England, UK
• Education—B.A., Oxford University
• Awards—(see below)
• Currently—lives in England


Susanna Mary Clarke is an English author best known for her debut novel Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (2004), a Hugo Award-winning alternative history. Her second novel, Parenesi, was published in 2020.

Clarke is the eldest daughter of a Methodist minister and his wife. Although she was born in Nottingham, because of her father's ministerial posts, she spent her childhood in various towns across Northern England and Scotland. Reading became one of her main pleasures, especially the works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Charles Dickens, and Jane Austen.

Clarke received a Bachelor of Arts degree in philosophy, politics, and economics from St Hilda's College, Oxford in 1981. For eight years, she worked in publishing at Quarto and Gordon Fraser, then spent two years teaching English as a foreign language in Turin, Italy and Bilbao, Spain.

Returning to County Durham in 1992, Clarke spent the rest of that year in a house overlooking the North Sea. There she began working on her first novel in 1993 and also took a position as a cookbook editor for Simon & Schuster in Cambridge. She remained in that job for the next ten years.

In 2003, Bloomsbury began working on the publication of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, which became a bestseller when released in 2004.

Two years later, Clarke published a collection of her short stories, The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories (2006). The novel and short stories are set in a magical England and written in a pastiche of the styles of 19th-century writers such as Jane Austen and Charles Dickens. Piranesi, Clarke's second novel came out in September, 2020 to excellent reviews.

Awards
2005—Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell
• Hugo Award for Best Novel
• Locus Award for Best First Novel
• Mythopoeic Award
• British Book Awards Newcomer of the Year Award
(Author bio adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 9/24/2020.)