Imatge de l'autor

Kate Atkinson

Autor/a de Life After Life

35+ obres 45,079 Membres 2,223 Ressenyes 221 preferits

Sobre l'autor

Kate Atkinson was born in York, and studied English Literature at the University of Dundee. She earned her Masters Degree from Dundee in 1974. She then went on to study for a doctorate in American Literature but she failed at the viva (oral examination) stage. After leaving the university, she took mostra'n més on a variety of jobs from home help to legal secretary and teacher. Her first novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum, won the 1995 Whitbread Book of the Year ahead of Salman Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh and Roy Jenkins's biography of William Ewart Gladstone. It went on to be a Sunday Times bestseller. Since then, she has published another five novels, one play, and one collection of short stories. Her work is often celebrated for its wit, wisdom and subtle characterisation, and the surprising twists and plot turns. Her most recent work has featured the popular former detective Jackson Brodie. In 2009, she donated the short story Lucky We Live Now to Oxfam's 'Ox-Tales' project, four collections of UK stories written by 38 authors. Atkinson's story was published in the 'Earth' collection. In March 2010, Atkinson appeared at the York Literature Festival, giving a world-premier reading from an early chapter from her forthcoming novel Started Early, Took My Dog, which is set mainly in the English city of Leeds. Atkinson's bestselling novel, Life after Life, has won numerous awards, including the COSTA Novel Award for 2013. The follow-up to Life After Life is A God in Ruins and was published in 2015. This title won a Costa Book Award 2015 in the novel category. (Bowker Author Biography) mostra'n menys
Crèdit de la imatge: Kate Atkinson Photo: John Foley/Opale

Sèrie

Obres de Kate Atkinson

Life After Life (2013) 8,218 exemplars
Case Histories (2004) 7,911 exemplars
Behind the Scenes at the Museum (1995) 4,872 exemplars
One Good Turn (2006) 4,341 exemplars
When Will There Be Good News? (2008) 3,980 exemplars
Started Early, Took My Dog (2010) 3,114 exemplars
A God in Ruins (2015) 2,928 exemplars
Transcription (2018) 2,364 exemplars
Human Croquet (1997) 1,903 exemplars
Emotionally Weird (2000) 1,716 exemplars
Big Sky (2019) 1,356 exemplars
Not the End of the World (2002) 1,038 exemplars
Shrines of Gaiety (2022) 954 exemplars
Normal Rules Don't Apply: Stories (2023) 212 exemplars
Shine, Pamela! Shine! (2020) 43 exemplars

Obres associades

The Watsons: A Fragment (1871) — Pròleg, algunes edicions198 exemplars
Ox-Tales: Earth (2009) — Col·laborador — 85 exemplars
Midsummer Nights (1702) — Col·laborador — 74 exemplars
Crimespotting (1656) — Col·laborador — 44 exemplars
The Mammoth Book of Best British Crime 8 (2011) — Col·laborador — 28 exemplars
New Writing 13 (2005) — Col·laborador — 17 exemplars
A Day in the Life (2003) — Col·laborador — 14 exemplars
Waterstone's Autumn Book Sampler (2004) — Col·laborador — 7 exemplars
Out of Line: Women on the Verge of a Breakthrough — Col·laborador — 1 exemplars

Etiquetat

Coneixement comú

Data de naixement
1951-12-20
Gènere
female
Nacionalitat
England
País (per posar en el mapa)
England, UK
Lloc de naixement
York, Yorkshire, England, UK
Llocs de residència
Whitby, Yorkshire, England, UK
Edinburgh, Scotland, UK
Educació
University of Dundee (1974)
Professions
legal secretary
teacher
novelist
Relacions
Hixon, Andy (partner or husband)
Premis i honors
British Book Award (Newcomer of the Year ∙ 1997)
E. M. Forster Award (1998)
Order of the British Empire (Member ∙ 2011)
Agent
Peter Straus
Biografia breu
She was born in York, and studied English Literature at the University of Dundee, gaining her Masters Degree in 1974. During her final year of this course, she was married for the first time. The marriage lasted only two years, but produced Atkinson's first daughter, Eve, who was born in 1975. She subsequently studied for a doctorate in American Literature which she failed at the viva stage. After leaving university, she took on a variety of miscellaneous jobs from home help to legal secretary and teacher. She lived in Whitby, Yorkshire for a time, but now lives in Edinburgh.

Membres

Converses

BRITISH AUTHOR CHALLENGE - OCTOBER 2016 - ATKINSON & GOLDING a 75 Books Challenge for 2016 (octubre 2016)
"Life After Life": Is it worth a read? a Girlybooks (setembre 2015)
Life after Life - Kate Atkinson a Orange January/July (maig 2014)

Ressenyes

I’m always impressed with Kate Atkinson’s writing. This collection of loosely connected short stories, by turns happy and sad, is a virtuoso performance of imagination, drawing on the story-telling traditions of Ovid and the Thousand-and-One-Nights.
The opening story is based on a discrepancy. Two young urban single women, Charlene and Trudi, seem to be living in a world of luxurious consumerism against a background of earthquake, explosions, and sniper fire. The collection’s title brought to mind Skeeter Davis’s tear-jerker hit. Don’t they know?
It turns out they do know, but they are shutting the fact out by force of imagination. But that is only revealed in the last of the twelve stories. The stories in between are tales of magic realism based on antique myth. They led me to revise my original understanding of the title. For “end” means not only a conclusion but also finitude or boundary. The stories suggest that the day-to-day world we take in with our senses is not all there is.
But then, when the book title forms the final sentence, spoken by Trudi to Charlene, the original sense comes back with the full weight of irony. It’s a sentence we all use to ourselves and each other after some physical or emotional skinned knee. And it’s even true of the world at the end of the book, but not for these two starving, plague-stricken young women. A downer of a conclusion, it haunted me for hours after I finished the book.
… (més)
 
Marcat
HenrySt123 | Hi ha 33 ressenyes més | Mar 18, 2024 |
I’ve read most of Kate Atkinson’s books, but I didn’t rush out to buy this one, as the reviews all focussed on the “branching narrative” thing and made it sound as if it would be rather gimmicky. It is gimmicky, of course, but now I finally get around to reading it (the book club picked it for this month) I have to admit that Atkinson is a good enough writer to get away with being gimmicky. It’s a very professionally assembled historical novel that gives us — multiple — convincing pictures of what it might have been like to grow up as the daughter of a middle-class Home Counties family in the first half of the 20th century.

We move pretty seamlessly from a Forster-ish view of the Todd family in its idyllic outer-suburban retreat ca. 1910 to a Stephen Spender view of the London Blitz (plus additional graphic horror that no-one writing at the time would have put in, but which we need because most of us nowadays haven’t actually lived through that kind of experience ourselves). Along the way, Atkinson gets us to think about things like the position of domestic servants, violence against women, and the limitation of educational and career opportunities for girls, all without ever seeming to be pressing any obviously anachronistic buttons. (Atkinson is from a similar background and generation to me, and her knowledge about England in the first half of the century must come from much the same kind of sources as mine, so it’s perhaps not surprising that it all rings so true…)

I’m not sure if the “multiple lives” thing actually adds much, but perhaps it does allow Atkinson to play with a wider range of ideas and settings than might comfortably have fitted into a simple linear narrative. And it does raise some interesting ideas about the arbitrariness of the kind of small events that dictate how our lives will turn out, even if we ignore all the slightly silly reincarnation and déjà-vu and “what if I went back to assassinate Hitler?” stuff.
… (més)
½
 
Marcat
thorold | Hi ha 587 ressenyes més | Mar 15, 2024 |
Plot was good, enjoyed how you gradually discover all the interconnections , fitting with the Russian dolll theme. Brody is not always the most likable character, but, like all the characters, complicated
 
Marcat
cspiwak | Hi ha 215 ressenyes més | Mar 6, 2024 |
I was disappointed in Shrines of Gaiety. It seems as though Kate Atkinson tried to do too much. The novel is witty in its language and is cleverly referential to itself and to other books and films of the 1920s, but there were too many characters, most of which were not sufficiently fleshed out for me to care about. I plodded on to the ending, hoping that it would redeem itself there, but although most of the plot lines were tied up, it was summarily and clumsily done. One of the characters is an aspiring novelist, and the description of his planned novel, entitled "The Age of Glitter," sums up the unrealized aspirations of Shrines of Gaiety nicely: "The Age of Glitter had rapidly become unwieldy. Yes, it was a crime novel, "but it was also a razor sharp dissection of the various strata of society in the wake of the destruction of war."… (més)
 
Marcat
vwinsloe | Hi ha 44 ressenyes més | Mar 1, 2024 |

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Estadístiques

Obres
35
També de
11
Membres
45,079
Popularitat
#363
Valoració
3.8
Ressenyes
2,223
ISBN
638
Llengües
24
Preferit
221

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