Victoria Glendinning

Victoria Glendinning is a biographer and novelist. She also writes reviews and articles, and does broadcasts and talks on all kinds of subjects.

Her biographies include A Suppressed Cry: Life and Death of a Quaker Daughter; Elizabeth Bowen: Portait of a Writer; Vita: The Life of V. Sackville-West (winner of the Whitbread Prize for Biography); Edith Sitwell: A Unicorn Among Lions (winner of the Duff Cooper Prize and the James Tait Black Prize); Rebecca West; Anthony Trollope (another Whitbread Prize for Biography), Jonathan Swift and Leonard Woolf. Her most recent book, Love’s Civil War, is an edited collection of letters between Elizabeth Bowen and Charles Ritchie. She is now working on a book about Stamford Raffles, to be published by Profile. Her novels include The Grown-Ups, Electricity and Flight.

Victoria has been President of English PEN and a Vice-President of the Royal Society of Literature, and although she has never had an academic post she has four honorary doctorates.

She lives with her husband Kevin O’Sullivan in Somerset. Her enthusiasms include travel, walking and gardening, and spending time with her four sons and eight grandchildren.