Susan Hill
Novelist, children’s writer and playwright Susan (Elizabeth) Hill was born in Scarborough, England, on 5 February 1942. Her first novel, The Enclosure, was published in 1961 when she was still a student. She worked as a freelance journalist between 1963 and 1968, publishing her third novel, Gentleman and Ladies, in 1968. She became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1972 and was a presenter of BBC Radio 4’s ‘Bookshelf’ from 1986 to 1987. In 1996 she started her own publishing company, Long Barn Books, editing and publishing a quarterly literary journal, Books and Company, in 1998.
She won a Somerset Maugham Award for I’m the King of the Castle; the Whitbread Novel Award for The Bird of Night; and the Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Prize for The Albatross, a collection of short stories. Her recent books include, The Various Haunts of Men, Pure in Heart, and The Risk of Darkness, from a series of books about the adventures of Detective Chief Inspector Simon Serailler. The Man who Turned into a Picture is a classic ghost story in the tradition of The Woman in Black.
