Atkinson, Kate (1951- ) novelist, playwright, short story writer

Kate Atkinson was born on December 20, 1951, in York. Her parents owned a medical supply shop, above which they lived, and Atkinson spent much of her childhood reading voraciously. Her favorite book, Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, would come to heavily influence her own work. After secondary school, she failed entrance exams to Oxford, Cambridge, and Edinburgh, taking a job as a chambermaid, then matriculating at the University of Dundee. After graduating in 1974 with an M.A. in literature, she pursued doctoral work on postmodern American short stories, studying American writers such as Donald Barthelme and Kurt Vonnegut. Their satirical, visually experimental, nonlinear style informed Atkinson’s work as well.

A brief marriage resulted in the birth of her first daughter, Eve. Atkinson began writing stories in 1982, after the birth of her second daughter, Helen. One of these stories won the 1986 Woman’s Own Short Story Competition, convincing Atkinson to pursue writing seriously. Her story “Karmic Mothers” won the prestigious Ian St. James prize in 1993; the attention Atkinson received for this encouraged her to write her breakthrough novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum.

This novel won the Whitbread Book of the Year award in 1995, beating works by authors such as Salman Rushdie. This sprawling work traces the life of Ruby Lennox, an unusually self-aware narrator, from conception to death as she weaves a complicated tapestry of the lives of her family. Its postmodern style, at once playful and profound, and its concern for the details of everyday life have led to Atkinson’s work being described as “Kurt Vonnegut meets Jane Austen.”

Atkinson’s second novel, Human Croquet (1997), spans an even greater arc, starting with the creation of the universe and ending with the return of the primeval forest to industrialized England. Despite its scope, however, it too focuses on the history of a large family by jumping between events in a nonchronological way. A third novel, Emotionally Weird: A Comic Novel (2000), parodies academic life. The circumlocutions and typographical experiments characteristic of Atkinson’s writing in these novels are stylistically reminiscent of Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, but her aim differs considerably from Sterne’s: while Tristram Shandy is a bawdy, comic novel, Atkinson’s work critiques the darker side of middle-class English life, revealing family secrets such as incest, domestic abuse, and adultery. In addition to her highly acclaimed novels, Atkinson has also written a collection of short stories, Not the End of the World (2002), and two plays, Nice (1996) and Abandonment (2000).

Other Works by Kate Atkinson:
- Case Histories. New York: Little, Brown, 2004.
- One Good Turn. New York: Little, Brown, 2006.

Works About Kate Atkinson:
- Clark, Roger. “Kate Atkinson.” In Dictionary of Literary Biography. Vol. 267, Twenty-First-Century British and Irish Novelists, edited by Michael R. Molino. Southern Illinois University at Carbon- dale. Farmington Hills, Mich.: Gale, 2002.
- Parker, Emma. Kate Atkinson’s Behind the Scenes at the Museum: A Reader’s Guide. New York: Continuum, 2002.
- Smith, Jules. “Kate Atkinson.” Contemporary Writers Online. British Council Arts. Available online. URL: http://www.contemporarywriters. com/authors/?p=auth4. Accessed December 7, 2007.