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Britain

Jane Gardam

Jane Gardam

Jane Gardam has been twice awarded the Whitbread Prize and was also a Booker prize finalist. She is winner of the David Higham Prize, the Royal Society for Literature’s Winifred Holtby Prize, the Katherine Mansfield Prize, and the Silver Pen Award from PEN. Her novels include God on the Rocks, shortlisted for the Booker Prize; Old Filth, finalist for the Orange Prize; The Man in the Wooden Hat, finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; and Last Friends, finalist for the Folio Award. She lives in the south of England near the sea.

In 1999 Jane Gardam was awarded the Heywood Hill Literary Prize in recognition of a distinguished literary career.

All Jane Gardam's books

Upcoming events

After little more than a month on the shelves, Jane Gardam's Old Filth goes to a second printing. Critics and readers have lauded the British author's latest novel, which M.A. Orthofer from the Philadelphia...
Jane Gardam’s The People on Privilege Hill has been selected by the NPR's  Fresh Air as one of their recommended books for summer reading. A story from the collection will soon be available...
Adam Thorpe and Jane Gardam head the shortlist for the National Short Story prize, the world's richest single story award, announced earlier today. They are joined on the shortlist for £15,000...
Few novelists produce their best work in their 80s. Yet the English writer Jane Gardam, 82, has done just that with her new novel The Man in the Wooden Hat (Europa, November). It comes on the heels of...

Latest reviews

  • “A Whitbread Award-winning British author offers a comedy of manners with considerable depth.”
    — Minneapolis Star Tribune, Dec 29 2017
  • “That Gardam is a virtuoso of structure creeps up on you until you begin to glimpse the outlines of the multiple subplots converging with the satisfying click that reminds you that you’re in the hands of a master.”
    — The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Dec 23 2017
  • “A sparkling, endearing account of first love, youthful folly and headstrong antics.”
    — Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Nov 27 2017
  • “Most wonderful, though, is the author’s eye for the eccentric in what’s perfectly normal.”
    — Minneapolis Star Tribune, Jul 28 2017
  • “For Jane Gardam fans, this new reprint of her novel Bilgewater will be a delight, almost as good as Old Filth. For those who don’t know Gardam, you’ll have a wonderful treat.”
    — New Pages, Aug 2 2016
  • "Readers will recognize signature Gardam-esque qualities of later works: psychological acuity, endearingly peculiar characters, and sly, understated prose."
    — New York Times, Jun 29 2016
  • OLD FILTH was named one of the 75 best books of the past 75 years by novelist Ann Patchett.
    — Parade, Jun 24 2016
  • “Female adolescence as imagined by one of the 20th century’s best—and most peculiar—writers.”
    — Kirkus Reviews, Apr 13 2016
  • The Man in the Wooden Hat, Last Friends and Old Filth by Jane Gardam are three novels that could, really should, be read in order. When I finished the last novel, I had to take a walk around the block to work off my disappointment that there wasn’t a fourth. The writer revisits...
    — Aug 31 2015
  • — Jul 28 2015
  • Jane Gardam’s first novel, A Long Way from Verona, was published as a children’s book, partly by accident, though it turned out to be a happy accident. In an August 2013 interview, she told Jared Bland of The Globe and Mail, “All my novels are about the influence of early...
    — Jul 27 2015
  • Roger Moore, Associate Dean and Senior Lecturer in English at Vanderbilt, has mixed feelings about Vanderbilt in spring.  “The campus is of course at its most beautiful right now, so I am enjoying my walks to and from work.  There’s definitely some restlessness in...
    — Apr 7 2015
  • The true hero of this short and charming novel is the wet, craggy farmland near Cumbria. Sheep have grazed here for over a thousand years, one of Jane Gardam’s locals tells us in “The Hollow Land,” and the community reveres tradition. Throughout the nine chapters that span...
    — Jan 24 2015
  • Jane Gardam’s ‘Hollow Land’ By MEG WOLITZER Just as devotees of certain television shows dream of finding lost episodes and Beatles fans imagine opening a box and fishing out recordings of forgotten studio sessions, so readers long for ways to extend the pleasure...
    — Jan 2 2015
  • Seattle Times reviewers share their favorite books of 2014. 14 December 2014 “The Stories of Jane Gardam” (Europa Editions). Richly observant, unsparing yet empathetic, this collected short fiction by Gardam, one of Britain’s great late-blooming writers, is a...
    — Dec 14 2014
  • The Stories of Jane Gardam will delight Gardam’s fans, who may find something new here. Unlike Gardam’s most famous novel Old Filth, but not unlike the ending of the third book in her trilogy Last Friends, these stories explore what may not be real. They also hold the element...
    — Sep 1 2014
  • Unexpected appearances of figures from the past drive many of these sly, bighearted tales.
    — Aug 10 2014
  • A novel can afford to unveil its secrets slowly. Not so a short story. With its constricted circuitry, it has to be a stairway of surprise (in Emerson’s phrase) or the reader will stop climbing at the second or third step. The most incisive stories by Jane Gardam, a writer...
    — Aug 4 2014
  • Spread over a period of 20 years, this selection of 28 short stories are as varied as it gets. One is about a diamond in the back of a character’s neck, another is about a homeless person, and so on and so forth. In other words, there is no chance for a reader of this...
    — Jul 31 2014
  • Gardam’s late-career flourishing began with a trilogy of novels about an expat British lawyer in Hong Kong. Now retired to rural southwest England, he appears in two of these stories, in which he finds that his new neighbor is a “jumped-up” former colleague. Gardam claims...
    — Jul 28 2014

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