Penelope Fitzgerald

Fitzgerald came from a notable literary and clerical family (her father edited Punch, her uncles included the theologian Ronald Knox) but spent decades in genuine hardship: teaching, working in a bookshop, and living for a time on a leaking Thames houseboat that eventually sank, taking most of the family's possessions with it. She didn't publish her first novel until sixty, after her husband's death left her needing an income.

Offshore, drawn straight from those houseboat years, won the Booker Prize and surprised a literary establishment that hadn't known her name. She then turned to increasingly compressed historical fiction set in worlds she'd never seen (Russia, Germany, Italy), culminating in The Blue Flower, imagining the young Romantic poet Novalis's love for a twelve-year-old girl, published when she was nearly eighty and acclaimed as her finest work.