12 Facts About Penelope Fitzgerald

Penelope Mary Fitzgerald was a Booker Prize-winning novelist, poet, essayist and biographer from Lincoln, England.

Penelope Fitzgerald was born Penelope Mary Knox on 17 December 1916 at the Old Bishop's Palace, Lincoln, the daughter of Edmund Knox, later editor of Punch, and Christina, nee Hicks, daughter of Edward Hicks, Bishop of Lincoln, and one of the first women students at Oxford.

Penelope Fitzgerald was a niece of the theologian and crime writer Ronald Knox, the cryptographer Dillwyn Knox, the Bible scholar Wilfred Knox, and the novelist and biographer Winifred Peck.

Penelope Fitzgerald was educated at Wycombe Abbey, an independent girls' boarding school, and Somerville College, Oxford University, where she graduated in 1938 with a congratulatory First, being named a "Woman of the Year" in Isis, the student newspaper.

Penelope Fitzgerald worked for the BBC in the Second World War.

Penelope Fitzgerald had been studying for the bar and enlisted as a soldier in the Irish Guards.

Penelope Fitzgerald won the Military Cross in the Western Desert Campaign in Libya, but returned to civilian life an alcoholic.

Penelope Fitzgerald taught "at a posh crammer", where her pupils included Anna Wintour, Edward St Aubyn, and Helena Bonham Carter.

Penelope Fitzgerald's archive was acquired by the British Library in June 2017.

Penelope Fitzgerald launched her literary career in 1975 at the age of 58, with "scholarly, accessible biographies" of the Pre-Raphaelite artist Edward Burne-Jones and two years later of The Knox Brothers, her father and uncles, although she never mentions herself by name.

Penelope Fitzgerald won the 1979 Booker Prize with Offshore, a novel set among houseboat residents in Battersea in 1961.

In 1999 Penelope Fitzgerald was awarded the Golden PEN Award by English PEN for "a Lifetime's Distinguished Service to Literature".