Susanna Clarke

Susanna Mary Clarke (born 1 November 1959) is an English author known for her debut novel Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (2004), a Hugo Award-winning alternative history.

Clarke was born on 1 November 1959 in Nottingham, England, the eldest daughter of a Methodist minister and his wife.

Owing to her father's posts, she spent her childhood in various towns across Northern England and Scotland, and enjoyed reading the works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Charles Dickens, and Jane Austen.

She studied philosophy, politics, and economics at St Hilda's College, Oxford, receiving her degree in 1981.

For eight years, she worked in publishing at Quarto and Gordon Fraser.

She spent two years teaching English as a foreign language in Turin, Italy and Bilbao, Spain.

She returned to England in 1992 and spent the rest of that year in County Durham, in a house that looked out over the North Sea.

Clarke began Jonathan Strange in 1993 and worked on it during her spare time.

There she began working on her first novel, Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. In 1993, she was hired by Simon & Schuster in Cambridge to edit cookbooks, a job she kept for the next ten years.

After she returned from Spain in 1993, Clarke began to think seriously about writing her novel.

She signed up for a five-day fantasy and science-fiction writing workshop, co-taught by science fiction and fantasy writers Colin Greenland and Geoff Ryman.

The students were expected to prepare a short story before attending, but Clarke only had "bundles" of material for her novel.

From this she extracted "The Ladies of Grace Adieu", a fairy tale about three women secretly practising magic who are discovered by the famous Jonathan Strange.

Greenland was so impressed with the story that, without Clarke's knowledge, he sent an excerpt to his friend, the fantasy writer Neil Gaiman.

Gaiman later said, "It was terrifying from my point of view to read this first short story that had so much assurance ... It was like watching someone sit down to play the piano for the first time and she plays a sonata."

Gaiman showed the story to his friend, science-fiction writer and editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden.

Clarke learned of these events when Nielsen Hayden called and offered to publish her story in his anthology Starlight 1 (1996), which featured pieces by well-regarded science-fiction and fantasy writers.

She accepted, and the book won the World Fantasy Award for best anthology in 1997.

Clarke spent the next ten years working on the novel in her spare time.

She also published stories in Starlight 2 (1998) and Starlight 3 (2001); according to The New York Times Magazine, her work was known and appreciated by a small group of fantasy fans and critics on the internet.

Overall, she published seven short stories in anthologies.

"Mr Simonelli, or The Fairy Widower" was shortlisted for a World Fantasy Award in 2001.

Clarke was never sure if she would finish her novel or if it would be published.

Clarke tried to write for three hours each day, beginning at 5:30 am, but struggled to keep this schedule.

Rather than writing the novel from beginning to end, she wrote in fragments and attempted to stitch them together.

Clarke, admitting that the project was for herself and not for the reader, "clung to this method" "because I felt that if I went back and started at the beginning, [the novel] would lack depth, and I would just be skimming the surface of what I could do. But if I had known it was going to take me ten years, I would never have begun. I was buoyed up by thinking that I would finish it next year, or the year after next."

Clarke and Greenland fell in love while she was writing the novel and moved in together.

Around 2001, Clarke "had begun to despair", and started looking for someone to help her finish and sell the book.

For the next decade, she published short stories from the Strange universe, but it was not until 2003 that Bloomsbury bought her manuscript and began work on its publication.

The novel became a best-seller.

Giles Gordon became her first literary agent and sold the unfinished manuscript to Bloomsbury in early 2003, after two publishers rejected it as unmarketable.

Bloomsbury were so sure the novel would be a success that they offered Clarke a £1 million advance.

They printed 250,000 hardcover copies simultaneously in the United States, Britain, and Germany.

Two years later, she published a collection of her short stories, The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories (2006).

Clarke first developed the idea for Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell while she was teaching in Bilbao: "I had a kind of waking dream ... about a man in 18th-century clothes in a place rather like Venice, talking to some English tourists. And I felt strongly that he had some sort of magical background – he'd been dabbling in magic, and something had gone badly wrong."

She had also recently reread J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings and afterwards was inspired to "[try] writing a novel of magic and fantasy".

Both Clarke's debut novel and her short stories are set in a magical England and written in a pastiche of the styles of 19th-century writers such as Jane Austen and Charles Dickens.

While Strange focuses on the relationship of two men, Jonathan Strange and Gilbert Norrell, the stories in Ladies focus on the power women gain through magic.

Clarke's second novel, Piranesi, was published in September 2020, winning the 2021 Women's Prize for Fiction.

In January 2024, she stated that she was currently working on a novel set in Bradford, England.