Iris Murdoch

Murdoch was born in Dublin to Anglo-Irish parents and raised in London, and read classics and philosophy at Oxford, where she briefly joined the Communist Party before breaking with it over Stalinism. After the war she worked with a UN relief agency in refugee camps in Austria and Belgium, encountering displacement and moral extremity firsthand before returning to Oxford to teach philosophy at St Anne's College.

She married the critic John Bayley in 1956 and published her first novel, Under the Net, the same year, going on to write twenty-six novels alongside serious academic philosophy on Plato and the nature of the good. The Sea, the Sea won the Booker Prize in 1978. In her seventies she developed Alzheimer's disease, an illness Bayley chronicled in his memoir Elegy for Iris; she died in Oxford in 1999.