Muriel Spark

Spark grew up in Edinburgh, the daughter of a Jewish father and a mother of Presbyterian background, and attended a girls' school whose formidable teachers she later recast as Marcia Blaine School in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. She married young and moved to Southern Rhodesia, where the marriage collapsed under her husband's violence and mental illness; she returned to Britain alone with her son during the war.

In London she worked for the Political Warfare Executive, drafting black propaganda and disinformation for broadcast into Germany, training in deception she later said sharpened her instinct for narrative trickery. She converted to Catholicism in 1954, crediting it with giving her fiction its precise moral shape, and published The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie in 1961. She spent her last decades in Tuscany with her companion, the sculptor Penelope Jardine, and died there in 2006.