穆里尔·斯帕克

Dame Muriel Sarah Spark (née Camberg; 1 February 1918 – 13 April 2006) was a Scottish novelist, short story writer, poet and essayist.

Life

Muriel Camberg was born in the Bruntsfield area of Edinburgh, the daughter of Bernard Camberg, an engineer, and Sarah Elizabeth Maud (née Uezzell). Her father was Jewish, born in Edinburgh of Lithuanian immigrant parents, and her English mother had been raised Anglican. She was educated at James Gillespie's School for Girls (1923–35), where she received some education in the Presbyterian faith. In 1934–35 she took a course in "commercial correspondence and précis writing" at Heriot-Watt College. She taught English for a brief time and then worked as a secretary in a department store.

In 1937 she became engaged to Sidney Oswald Spark, 13 years her senior, whom she had met in Edinburgh.……

Literary career

Spark began writing seriously, under her married name, after World War II, beginning with poetry and literary criticism. In 1947 she became editor of the Poetry Review. This position made Spark one of the few female editors of the time. Spark left the Poetry Review in 1948. In 1953 Muriel Spark was baptized in the Church of England but in 1954 she decided to join the Roman Catholic Church, which she considered crucial in her development toward becoming a novelist. She was formally instructed by Dom Ambrose Agius, a Benedictine monk of Ealing Priory, whom she had known from her Poetry Society days, and was received into the Roman Catholic Church on 1 May 1954 by Dom Ambrose.……

Archive and biography

In the 1940s Spark began to keep a record of her professional and personal activities that developed into a comprehensive personal archive containing diaries, accounts and cheque books and tens of thousands of letters. Spark used her archive to write her autobiography, Curriculum Vitae, and after its publication in 1992 much of the material was deposited at National Library of Scotland.

Spark refused permission for the publication of a biography of her by Martin Stannard. Penelope Jardine holds publication approval rights, and the book was posthumously published in July 2009. On 27 July 2009 Stannard was interviewed on Front Row, the BBC Radio 4 arts programme. According to A. S.……

Honours and acclaim

Spark received the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1965 for The Mandelbaum Gate, the Ingersoll Foundation T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing in 1992 and the David Cohen Prize in 1997. She became an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in 1967 and Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1993 for services to literature. She was twice short-listed for the Booker Prize, in 1969 for The Public Image and in 1981 for Loitering with Intent. In 1998, she was awarded the Golden PEN Award by English PEN for a "Lifetime's Distinguished Service to Literature".

Spark received eight honorary doctorates including Doctor of the University degree (Honoris causa) from her alma mater, Heriot-Watt University in 1995;……

Relationship with her son

Spark and her son Samuel Robin Spark had a distant relationship. He was raised by Spark's parents from the age of seven. In 1998, a reporter from The Jewish Chronicle published a story about the ketubah of Spark's parents at the East London Synagogue which would have required both the bride and groom to prove that they are Jewish. The revelation caused Spark to write to The Sunday Telegraph denying that her mother was Jewish and requested that they "please do not falsify my cultural heritage with your bureaucratic fixtures and labels." In a letter to The Scotsman, Robin Spark claimed that he was embarrassed by his mother's letter and described his "conventional Jewish childhood" under his grandparents;……