Kate Atkinson (1951- ) was born in York and studied English Literature at Dundee University gaining her Masters Degree in 1974. During her final year of this course she was married for the first time. The marriage lasted only two years, but produced Atkinson's first daughter, Eve, who was born in 1975. She then studied for a doctorate in American Literature which she failed at the viva stage. After leaving university she took on a variety of miscellaneous jobs from home help to legal secretary and teacher. She has lived in Whitby, Yorkshire but now lives in Edinburgh.

Her first novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum, won the 1995 Whitbread Book of the Year ahead of strong competition including Salman Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh and Roy Jenkins's biography of William Gladstone. Since then she has published three novels, one play, and one collection of short stories. An exceptional comic novelist, her unique style often sees her juxtaposing mundane everyday life with fantastic magical events, a technique that accounts in part for the magic realism that can be seen in her work.

Published works

Novels

• Behind the Scenes at the Museum (1995)
• Human Croquet (1997)
• Emotionally Weird (2000)
• Case Histories (2004)

Plays

• Abandonment (2000)

Collections of short stories

• Not the End of the World (2002)

External links

• www.contemporarywriters.com