Jill Paton Walsh


Jill Paton Walsh is an English novelist and children's writer. She may be known best for the Peter Wimsey–Harriet Vane mysteries that have completed and continued the work of Dorothy Sayers.

Personal life

Born Gillian Bliss, she was educated at St. Michael's Convent, North Finchley, London, and she read English Literature at St Anne's College, Oxford. She lives in Cambridge. In 1961, she married Antony Paton Walsh ; the couple had one son and two daughters. In 2004, she married John Rowe Townsend, who died in 2014.
Her brother, Christopher Bliss, was Nuffield Professor of International Economics at Oxford University and a Fellow of Nuffield College.

Honours

In 1996, Paton Walsh received the CBE for services to literature and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. In 1998 she won the Phoenix Award from the Children's Literature Association, recognising A Chance Child as the best children's book published twenty years earlier that did not win a major award.

On writing for children

In an essay on realism in children's literature, Walsh stated that realism is also metaphorical, and that she would like the relationship between the reader and her characters Bill and Julie to be as metaphorical as that between "dragons and the reader's greed or courage".

Works

Knowledge of Angels, a medieval philosophical novel, shortlisted for the 1994 Booker Prize. Other adult novels include:
Paton Walsh wrote four detective stories featuring part-time college nurse Imogen Quy, set in fictional St. Agatha's College, University of Cambridge:
In 1998, she completed Dorothy L. Sayers's unfinished Lord Peter Wimsey–Harriet Vane novel, Thrones, Dominations. In 2002, she followed this up with another Lord Peter novel, A Presumption of Death. In 2010, she published a third, The Attenbury Emeralds. Her latest addition to the series, The Late Scholar, was published 5 December 2013 in the UK, and 14 January 2014 in North America.

Children's books