Isabel Quigly
- Prizes judged
Isabel Quigly, who died in 2018, was born in Spain and her parents called her Elizabeth; however, the local priest refused to recognise the name and so she became Isabel instead.
Quigly was part of the first cohort of women to receive a full degree from Cambridge and went on to work for Penguin books before becoming the film critic of the Spectator (a position she relinquished after a decade when, with failing sight, she refused to wear glasses). A reviewer and prolific translator from the Italian (she married an Italian during a stop-off in Florence while on her way to South Africa to marry another man), she can claim to be the woman who spotted Lampedusa’s The Leopard and had it first translated into English (though not, to her chagrin, by herself).