20 Facts About Ruth Rendell

Ruth Barbara Rendell, Baroness Rendell of Babergh, was an English author of thrillers and psychological murder mysteries.

Ruth Rendell's mother, Ebba Kruse, was born in Sweden to Danish parents and brought up in Denmark; her father, Arthur Grasemann, was English.

Ruth Rendell was educated at the County High School for Girls in Loughton, Essex, the town to which the family moved during her childhood.

Ruth Rendell met her husband Don Ruth Rendell when she was working as a newswriter.

Ruth Rendell made the county of Suffolk her home for many years, using the settings in several of her novels.

Ruth Rendell lived in the villages of Polstead and later Groton, both east of Sudbury.

Ruth Rendell was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 1996 Birthday Honours and a life peer as Baroness Rendell of Babergh, of Aldeburgh in the County of Suffolk, on 24 October 1997.

Ruth Rendell sat in the House of Lords for the Labour Party.

In 1998 Ruth Rendell was named on a list of the party's biggest private financial donors.

Ruth Rendell introduced into the Lords the bill that would later become the Female Genital Mutilation Act 2003.

Ruth Rendell was vegetarian who was described as living mostly on fruit.

Baroness Ruth Rendell's awards include the Silver, Gold, and Cartier Diamond Daggers from the Crime Writers' Association, three Edgars from the Mystery Writers of America, The Arts Council National Book Awards, and The Sunday Times Literary Award.

Ruth Rendell was a patron of the charity Kids for Kids which helps children in rural areas of Darfur.

Ruth Rendell had a stroke on 7 January 2015 and died on 2 May 2015.

The Ruth Rendell award was introduced in 2016 by the National Literacy Trust.

Ruth Rendell said that the character of Wexford was based on herself.

In Introducing Chief Inspector Wexford by Daniel Mallory he says that Ruth Rendell refers to the hated Agatha and that awful Marple woman; and says of St Mary Mead that she can hardly bear to say the name of that village where one finds a lot of normal, law-abiding people living ordinary, blameless lives, who suddenly decide to murder their aunt.

Ruth Rendell created a third strand of writing with the publication in 1986 of A Dark-Adapted Eye under her pseudonym Barbara Vine.

Ruth Rendell injected the social changes of the last 40 years into her work, bringing awareness to such issues as domestic violence.

Ruth Rendell said that Claude Chabrol's 1995 version of A Judgement in Stone, La Ceremonie with Sandrine Bonnaire, was one of the few film adaptations of her work that she was happy with.