Angela Carter
- Prizes judged
Angela Carter was a lauded novelist who died of lung cancer aged just 51. Despite acclaimed books such as Wise Children and Nights at the Circus, she was never nominated for the Booker Prize.
Carter was best known for her feminist and magical realist fiction but was also a children’s author and radio and television writer. Within three days of her death in 1992, her publishers, Virago, had sold out of her books. Her life was one of variety, including a long spell in Japan where she worked in a hostess bar, involvement with CND and the folk music scene, and writing for both the feminist magazine Spare Rib and the soft porn Men Only. According to her biographer, Carter ‘never allowed herself to settle into any predictable guise or attitude for long’.