Penelope Lively

Lively was born in Cairo to British parents and raised largely by an Egyptian nanny within the city's insulated expatriate community, a childhood ended abruptly at twelve when her parents' divorce sent her to boarding school in England, a rupture she later said fixed memory and displacement as her lifelong subjects.

She read history at Oxford's St Anne's College, then spent over a decade as a celebrated children's author, winning the Carnegie Medal for The Ghost of Thomas Kempe (1973) before turning to fiction for adults in the late 1970s.

Moon Tiger (1987) follows Claudia Hampton, a dying popular historian, reassembling her own life out of chronological order: its center a wartime love affair with a British tank officer during the North African campaign that outshines everything ordinary that came after; it won the Booker Prize. Lively has continued writing into her nineties from Oxfordshire.