19 Facts About Margot Livesey

Margot Livesey was born on 1953 and is a Scottish-born writer.

Margot Livesey is the author of ten novels, a collection of short stories, a collection of essays on writing and the co-author, with Lynn Klamkin, of a textbook.

Margot Livesey was formerly the fiction editor at Ploughshares, an American literary journal.

Margot Livesey currently divides her time between Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Iowa City, Iowa, where she is a member of the faculty at the Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa.

Margot Livesey has taught at Boston University, Bowdoin College, Brandeis University, Carnegie Mellon University, Cleveland State University, Emerson College, Tufts University, the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers, and Williams College.

Margot Livesey has frequently been a faculty member at the Bread Loaf and Sewanee writers' conferences, among other conferences.

Margot Livesey was raised on the grounds of what was then a Scottish private boys' school, Glenalmond College, approximately 50 miles north of Edinburgh.

Margot Livesey's father, John Kenneth Livesey, was a teacher at the school, while her mother, Eva Barbara Livesey, was a nurse.

Margot Livesey's mother died when Livesey was two years old and her father remarried.

Margot Livesey's first fiction publication was a short story, "Someone Else's," in Prism International in 1976.

In 1983, Margot Livesey joined the faculty at Tufts University and in 1986 published her first book, a collection of stories, which included nine short stories, and a novella, "Learning By Heart," which gave the volume its title.

Margot Livesey has followed Homework with seven other novels to date, beginning with Criminals, about a banker who finds an abandoned infant in a bus station restroom and ends up leaving the baby with his sister.

Margot Livesey based the novel's eponymous protagonist on stories she had heard about her mother, Eva McEwen, and especially about her relationship with the supernatural.

In 2008, Margot Livesey published The House on Fortune Street, a novel constructed of four interwoven narratives: two centered on women, Abigail, an actress who owns the titular house, and Dara, a therapist who rents the downstairs apartment, and two on men: Abigail's academic boyfriend, Sean, who is working on his dissertation about John Keats, and Dara's estranged father, Cameron, a photographer who struggles with his feelings for young girls.

Each character's section possesses what Margot Livesey calls a "literary godparent," a writer whose work in some way influences the character's life: For Sean, it's Keats; for Abigail, it's Charles Dickens; for Dara it's Charlotte Bronte, and for Cameron, it's Charles Dodgson.

Margot Livesey set her novel in 1950s and 60s Scotland, and much of it echoes the story of Bronte's novel.

Margot Livesey's quest to discover her heritage is a crucial part of the narrative.

Margot Livesey followed The Flight of Gemma Hardy with Mercury, a novel about a couple struggling in a strained marriage.

The year after Mercury appeared, Margot Livesey published The Hidden Machinery, a collection of essays about writing; many of the essays had begun as lectures she had given as a teacher at a university or at a writers' conference.