CAROLE ANGIER
Carole Angier is the biographer of Jean Rhys and Primo Levi.
She started with a biography of Margaret Hill, sister of Geoffrey and John Maynard Keynes (1978). This was privately commissioned by Margaret Hill’s widower, the Cambridge scientist A.V.Hill, who paid her more generously than any commercial publisher until her third book.
Jean Rhys, her first published book, came out in 1985 (Viking/Penguin). It was very short, Carole likes to point out, and written, she likes to remember, in three months flat.
Jean Rhys: Life & Work (Andre Deutsch and Little,Brown) came out in 1990, after five years of work, and was not short. It won the Writers’ Guild Award for Non-Fiction in 1991.
The Double Bond: Primo Levi, a Biography (Viking/Penguin and Farrar Straus Giroux) came out in 2002. It had taken eight years, and was not short either. It was much acclaimed, and also reviled, both here and in Italy, where it appeared (from Mondadori) in 2004.
Carole was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature after the publication of The Double Bond in 2002.
She was educated at the Universities of McGill, Oxford and Cambridge. In turn she has taught literature, philosophy, biography, creative writing and academic writing over the years, for various External Studies Departments, for the Open University, and for the University of Warwick, where she was the Royal Literary Fund Fellow from 1999 to 2003. She still teaches when she is not writing, or even when she is.
She reviews regularly, again except when she is trying to finish a book of her own.
She has one grown-up son and lives in Oxfordshire. She is a volunteer visitor to immigration detainees at Campsfield House near Oxford, and a Message and Tracing volunteer with the Red Cross. Her last teaching project was a creative writing class with refugees and asylum seekers in Oxford published as The Story of My Life.
