Jane Mary Gardam is an English writer of children's and adult fiction. She also writes reviews for The Spectator and The Telegraph, and writes for BBC radio. She lives in Kent, Wimbledon, and Yorkshire. She has won numerous literary awards, including the Whitbread Award twice. She was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire in the 2009 New Year Honours.
Biography
Gardam was born in Coatham, North Yorkshire, to William and Kathleen Mary Pearson, and grew up in Cumberland and the North Riding of Yorkshire. At the age of seventeen, she won a scholarship to read English at Bedford College, London, now part of Royal Holloway, University of London. After leaving university, Gardam worked in a number of literary-related jobs, starting off as a Red Cross Travelling Librarian for hospital libraries, and later a journalist. She married David Gardam QC and they had three children, Tim, Catharine Nicholson, a botanical artist who died in 2011, and Tom. Gardam's first book was a children's novel, A Long Way From Verona, a 13-year-old girl's first-person narrative, it was published in 1971. It won the Phoenix Award from the Children's Literature Association in 1991, which recognizes the best children's book published twenty years earlier that did not win a major award. In her most recent works of fiction she has explored related themes and recounted stories from different points of view in three novels: Old Filth, The Man in the Wooden Hat, and Last Friends. One American reviewer noted that her concern with "the intricate web of manners and class peculiar to the inhabitants of her homeland" does not explain why she remains less well known to an international audience than her English contemporaries. He recommended Old Filth for its "typical excellence and compulsive readability", written by a novelist "at the top of her form". The Spectator praised The Man in the Wooden Hat for its "rich complexities of chronology, settings and characters, all manipulated with marvellous dexterity". In 2015, a BBC survey voted Old Filth among the 100 greatest British novels.
