Angela Carter

Carter grew up partly evacuated to her grandmother's home in South Yorkshire during the war, then worked as a junior newspaper reporter in Croydon before reading English at Bristol University, where she specialized in medieval literature, a source she later ransacked for fairy tale and folklore. Prize money from the Somerset Maugham Award let her leave her first marriage and spend two years living in Japan in the early 1970s, an experience she credited with radicalizing her feminism and estranging her, usefully, from English convention.

Back in Britain she wrote The Sadeian Woman, a controversial feminist reading of the Marquis de Sade, alongside The Bloody Chamber (1979) and the picaresque Nights at the Circus (1984). She taught creative writing and mentored a generation of younger novelists, including Kazuo Ishiguro. She died of lung cancer in London in 1992, at fifty-one.