Kate Atkinson writes literary historical fiction that often plays with time, memory, alternate outcomes and domestic life under pressure.
Kate Atkinson was born in York in 1951 and studied English literature at the University of Dundee. She continued into postgraduate research and later worked in a variety of jobs, including teaching, before establishing herself as a writer. Her first novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum, won the Whitbread Book of the Year in 1995 and introduced the combination of family history, structural play and dark humour that recurs throughout her work.
Atkinson writes both literary fiction and the Jackson Brodie crime novels, but several of her most important books are deeply historical. Life After Life repeatedly reimagines the life of Ursula Todd across the first half of the twentieth century, using alternate outcomes to examine chance, war and survival. A God in Ruins follows Ursula’s brother Teddy, a bomber pilot whose wartime experience shapes the rest of his life, while Transcription explores intelligence work, deception and memory during and after the Second World War. Atkinson is less concerned with reconstructing a single definitive past than with showing how private lives are reordered by contingency and by the stories families tell about themselves.
