Lively, Penelope, << LYV lee, puh NEHL uh pee >> (1933-…), is a British author known for both adult novels and literature for children. Lively won the 1987 Booker Prize, the United Kingdom’s best-known literary award, for her adult novel Moon Tiger (1987).
Many of Lively’s adult books focus on the ways in which the past intrudes upon the present. For example, Moon Tiger deals with the deathbed memories of a historian and war correspondent during World War II (1939-1945). She reflects upon her turbulent life, including her intense love affair with a young tank commander who died in the war.
In Lively’s novel Treasures of Time (1979), the past and the present come together in a story about an eminent archaeologist and the site whose excavation made him famous. Judgement Day (1980) revolves around a church congregation in an English village. In Perfect Happiness (1983), a woman finds a new life for herself after her famous husband dies. Lively mixes autobiography and fiction in Making It Up (2005).
Lively’s other adult novels include The Road to Lichfield (1977), her first adult novel; Next to Nature, Art (1982); According to Mark (1984); Passing On (1989); City of the Mind (1991); Cleopatra’s Sister (1993); Heat Wave (1996); Beyond the Blue Mountains (1997); Spiderweb (1999); The Photograph (2003); Consequences (2007), Family Album (2009), and How It All Began (2012). Her collected short stories were published as Pack of Cards (1986) and The Purple Swamp Hen (2017).
Lively first gained recognition with her children’s books, beginning with Astercote (1970). Her other children’s novels include The Whispering Knights (1971), The Ghost of Thomas Kempe (1973), A Stitch in Time (1976), Dragon Trouble (1984), Debbie and the Little Devil (1987), The Cat, the Crow and the Banyan Tree (1994), and Staying with Grandpa (1995). Lively also wrote a series of children’s books that follow the adventures of a little girl named Fanny. They include Fanny’s Sister (1976), Fanny and the Monster (1979), and Fanny and the Battle of Potter’s Piece (1980).
Lively wrote a nonfiction book on landscape history, The Presence of the Past (1976). She wrote the autobiographies Oleander, Jacaranda: A Childhood Perceived (1994), A House Unlocked (2002), and Dancing Fish and Ammonites (2014). She has also written stage plays and radio and television scripts.
Penelope Margaret Greer was born on March 17, 1933, in Cairo, Egypt, of English parents. She moved to England with her family at the age of 12. She earned a history degree at Oxford University in 1956 and married Jack Lively, a university instructor, in 1957.
