Susanna Clarke

Susanna Clarke is a British author best known for her two novels, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, published in 2004, and Piranesi, published in 2020. She was born in 1959 in Nottingham England as the eldest daughter of a Methodist minister and his wife. Due to her father’s position, she traveled frequently during her childhood and read many classic works of literature. She earned a degree in philosophy, politics and economics in 1981 from St. Hilda’s College, Oxford. After graduating, she worked for eight years at the publishing houses Quarto and Gordon Fraser. From there, she taught English abroad for two years and returned to England in 1992. There, she began work on her first novel, Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, a novel which took her 10 years to complete. During this time, she worked as a cookbook editor for Simon & Schuster, publishing occasional short stories on the side. After a long search, Clarke sold her manuscript to Bloomsbury in 2003 and it was published the next year. The story, a fantastical alternative history set in 19th-century England, was an immediate critical and commercial success. In 2006, she published a collection of eight fairy tales titled, The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories. Abandoning her ambitious plans for a sequel to Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, Clarke decided to work on a simpler project, Piranesi. She currently lives with her husband Colin Greenland, a fellow fantasy writer.