Susanna Clarke

Susanna Mary Clarke was born on 1 November 1959 in Nottingham, the eldest daughter of a Methodist minister. Because her father's work took the family from parish to parish, her childhood was spent moving between towns across Northern England and Scotland — a nomadic early life that gave her a deep familiarity with the older, quieter corners of England. She studied philosophy, politics, and economics at St Hilda's College, Oxford, graduating in 1981, before spending eight years in non-fiction publishing at Quarto and Gordon Fraser.

In 1990 she left London to teach English in Turin and then Bilbao. It was during her time in Spain that the first image arrived: a waking daydream of a man in eighteenth-century clothes, somewhere Venetian, with the unmistakable feel of magic gone wrong. That seed became Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. She returned to England in 1992, settled in County Durham in a house overlooking the North Sea, and began to write in earnest. From 1993 onwards she balanced the novel against a day job as a cookery editor at Simon & Schuster's Cambridge office, working in stolen early-morning hours rather than in any conventional writing routine.

The novel took a decade to complete. Along the way she extracted short stories from the same fictional world and placed them in American anthologies, quietly building a small but devoted following. When fantasy writer Neil Gaiman read an early excerpt, he described it as like watching someone sit down at the piano for the first time and play a sonata. Her story "Mr Simonelli, or The Fairy Widower" was shortlisted for a World Fantasy Award in 2001. Then, in 2003, Bloomsbury acquired the manuscript, and Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell was published the following year to immediate critical and commercial success. It reached number three on the New York Times bestseller list, was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and won the Hugo Award, the World Fantasy Award, and the Mythopoeic Award, all in 2005.

The novel is set in an alternative Regency England where magic has returned after centuries of absence, embodied by two very different practitioners: the reclusive, scholarly Gilbert Norrell and the dashing, instinctive Jonathan Strange. Clarke's prose owes a clear debt to nineteenth-century British writers — Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, George Meredith — with a deadpan narrative voice that slides from social comedy into something darker and more gothic as the magic grows more volatile. One of its most distinctive features is its near-two-hundred footnotes, which construct an entire fictional corpus of magical scholarship and give the book the texture of genuine alternative history. A seven-part BBC television adaptation followed in 2015.

In 2006, Clarke published The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories, a collection of eight fairy tales set in the same alternate England, with a sharper focus on the women who practise magic quietly, under the radar of the men who claim to own it. The stories are written in an eighteenth- and nineteenth-century register and stand confidently alongside the novel rather than merely supplementing it.

Sixteen years passed before her second novel appeared. In the interim, Clarke had been managing ME/CFS, a chronic illness that severely limited her capacity to write. Piranesi, published in September 2020, is in almost every way a formal departure from her debut: short, intimate, and narrated in journal entries by a man who lives alone in a vast, labyrinthine House filled with statues and tidal halls. Where Jonathan Strange spans hundreds of characters and eight hundred pages, Piranesi works through restraint and accumulation. Clarke has described it as more manageable precisely because it didn't require the same breadth of research or cast. It won the Women's Prize for Fiction in 2021, with the judges calling it "a truly original, unexpected flight of fancy." Clarke dedicated the win to women incapacitated by chronic illness.

Despite their differences in scale, both novels share a consistent preoccupation: the relationship between the rational and the inexplicable, between the ordered surface of everyday life and the chaotic, often dangerous thing that magic represents in Clarke's imagination. Her prose — polite, precise, and quietly ominous — has a way of making the supernatural feel entirely plausible while never quite letting the reader feel safe. In 2024, she published the illustrated novella The Wood at Midwinter, returning to shorter-form storytelling. She lives in Derbyshire.