A sense of completeness, of understanding, enfolding all difference: An interview with Maggie Gee

Abstract

Maggie Gee (OBE) is an innovative and unusual contemporary novelist whose work has been translated into thirteen languages and short-listed for two prestigious global literary prizes, the Orange Prize and the International Impact Award. In 1982 Maggie Gee was selected as one of the original twenty “Best of Young British Novelists” and became a Writing Fellow at the University of East Anglia; from 2004–2008, she was the first female Chair of Council of the Royal Society of Literature, and in 2006 she and Hilary Mantel were appointed as the two Visiting Professors of Creative Writing at Sheffield Hallam University. In 2012 there was an international conference about her work at St. Andrews University, and in the same year she was given an OBE for services to literature. She is now a professor of creative writing at Bath Spa University.