Ann Thwaite is a British writer who is the author of five major biographies. AA Milne: His Life was the Whitbread Biography of the Year, 1990. Edmund Gosse: A Literary Landscape was described by John Carey as "magnificent - one of the finest literary biographies of our time". Glimpses of the Wonderful about the life of Edmund's father, Philip Henry Gosse, was picked out by DJ Taylor in the Independent as one of the "Ten Best Biographies" ever. Frances Hodgson Burnett was originally published as Waiting for the Party and reissued in 2007 with the sub-title Beyond the Secret Garden. Emily Tennyson, The Poet's Wife was reissued by Faber Finds for the Tennyson bicentenary in 2009.
Biography
Born in London, Ann spent the war years in New Zealand, returning to complete her education at Queen Elizabeth's, Barnet, and St Hilda's College, Oxford. She has lived in Tokyo, Benghazi and Nashville, Tennessee. She has lectured in many countries, but most of her life has been spent as a writer, and she is now settled in Norfolk with her husband, the poet Anthony Thwaite. She is an Oxford D.Litt., and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She is an Honorary Fellow of Roehampton University and has an honorary doctorate from the University of East Anglia. For forty years, Ann Thwaite wrote children's books, including The Camelthorn Papers, translated into Japanese and Greek, Tracks, a New Zealand story, and a much-loved picture book, Gilbert and the Birthday Cake. Jan Mark included her storyFeeding the Cats in the Oxford Book of Children's Stories. She reviewed children's books, mainly in The Times Literary Supplement, for many years, and ran a library for local children in her home. The Brilliant Career of Winnie-the Pooh, a scrapbook offshoot of her Milne biography, was published on both sides of the Atlantic in 1992. She edited Allsorts, an annual collection that included new work for children by such writers as Michael Frayn, James Fenton, Penelope Lively and William Trevor. My Oxford contained memories of their time there by writers including John Mortimer, Antonia Fraser, and Martin Amis. Her edition of Portraits from Life is a collection of Edmund Gosse's essays on his friends, including Henry James, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Thomas Hardy. In 2009 Ann Thwaite published Passageways, the story of a New Zealand family, and it was much praised on both sides of the world. All eight of her great grandparents emigrated to New Zealand in the middle of the nineteenth century, and it was the realisation that she knew so much more about the families of her biographical subjects that made her look into her own family history. In 2017 she published a version of her 1990 biography of A.A Milne to coincide with the major film Goodbye Christopher Robin for which she was a consultant. It appeared with the subtitle A.A Milne and the Making of Winnie-the-Pooh and had an introduction by Frank Cottrell Boyce, the screenwriter. In 2018 Goodbye Christopher Robin was translated into Japanese. In 1990 Christopher Milne had written to the author: "In you my father has found the perfect biographer... I am left with nothing but admiration and happiness."
