Susanna Clarke

Clarke worked as an editor on Simon & Schuster's cookery list in Cambridge for a decade while writing her debut, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (2004), a footnoted alternate-history fantasy that became an immediate bestseller and awards sweep.

Shortly afterward she was diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome so severe that the resulting cognitive fog kept her from finishing a second novel for sixteen years; Piranesi (2020), spare and short where her debut had been vast, arrived out of that same enforced stillness.

Piranesi won the Women's Prize for Fiction in 2021; in her acceptance speech she dedicated the win to other women 'incapacitated by long illness.'