Alice Thompson (born in
Edinburgh
Edinburgh ( ; gd, Dùn Èideann ) is the capital city of Scotland and one of its 32 Council areas of Scotland, council areas. Historically part of the county of Midlothian (interchangeably Edinburghshire before 1921), it is located in Lothian ...
) is a Scottish novelist.
Thompson was educated at
St George's School, Edinburgh,
[Alice Thompson discovers island life , Herald Scotland]
Retrieved 7 Jan 2014. then read English at
Oxford University
Oxford () is a city in England. It is the county town and only city of Oxfordshire. In 2020, its population was estimated at 151,584. It is north-west of London, south-east of Birmingham and north-east of Bristol. The city is home to the ...
and wrote her
Ph.D. thesis on
Henry James
Henry James ( – ) was an American-British author. He is regarded as a key transitional figure between literary realism and literary modernism, and is considered by many to be among the greatest novelists in the English language. He was th ...
. In the 1980s she was the keyboard player with rock band
The Woodentops.
[ She has a son, and lives in Edinburgh. Her novel '' Justine'' was the joint winner of the 1996 ]James Tait Black Memorial Prize
The James Tait Black Memorial Prizes are literary prizes awarded for literature written in the English language. They, along with the Hawthornden Prize, are Britain's oldest literary awards. Based at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, U ...
.
Novels
*''Killing Time'' (1990
File:1990 Events Collage.png, From left, clockwise: The 1990 FIFA World Cup is played in Italy; The Human Genome Project is launched; Voyager I takes the famous Pale Blue Dot image- speaking on the fragility of Humankind, humanity on Earth, Astroph ...
) - novella
*'' Justine'' (1996
File:1996 Events Collage.png, From left, clockwise: A bomb explodes at Centennial Olympic Park in Atlanta, set off by a radical anti-abortionist; The center fuel tank explodes on TWA Flight 800, causing the plane to crash and killing everyone on b ...
)
*''Pandora's Box
Pandora's box is an artifact in Greek mythology connected with the myth of Pandora in Hesiod's c. 700 B.C. poem '' Works and Days''. Hesiod reported that curiosity led her to open a container left in the care of her husband, thus releasing phy ...
'' (1998
1998 was designated as the ''International Year of the Ocean''.
Events January
* January 6 – The ''Lunar Prospector'' spacecraft is launched into orbit around the Moon, and later finds evidence for frozen water, in soil in permanently s ...
)
*'' Pharos: A Ghost Story'' (2002
File:2002 Events Collage.png, From left, clockwise: The 2002 Winter Olympics are held in Salt Lake City; Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother and her daughter Princess Margaret, Countess of Snowdon die; East Timor gains independence from Indonesia and ...
)
*'' The Falconer'' (2008
File:2008 Events Collage.png, From left, clockwise: Lehman Brothers went bankrupt following the Subprime mortgage crisis; Cyclone Nargis killed more than 138,000 in Myanmar; A scene from the opening ceremony of the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing ...
)
*''The Existential Detective
''The'' () is a grammatical article in English, denoting persons or things that are already or about to be mentioned, under discussion, implied or otherwise presumed familiar to listeners, readers, or speakers. It is the definite article in ...
'' (2010)
*''Burnt Island'' (2013)
*''The Book Collector'' (2015)
Critical reception
"Their romance had been like a fairytale. If only she could work out which fairytale it was, it would somehow help her." Will it be ''The Red Shoes'', whose heroine is danced to death, punished by her worldly thoughts, or ''Mr Fox'', whose wife is enjoined to "Be bold, be bold, but not too bold"? Or maybe it's a modern tale, such as ''Rebecca'', with its saturnine hero obsessed with a dead wife and a ghastly secret."
"THERE is a distinctive ambience to an Alice Thompson novel. From ''Justine'', her debut which won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, through ''Pandora's Box'', ''Pharos'', ''The Falconer'', ''The Existential Detective'' and ''Burnt Island'', there is a kind of gothic postmodernism."
"A genuinely eerie tale, in a perfect setting and told with just the right amount of ambiguity."
"Some books evoke a particular piece of music, others, a particular color. The Falconer (2008) by Alice Thompson reminded me of a painting in Glasgow's Kelvingrove Art Gallery, which fascinated me as a child. The Fairy Raid (1867) by Scottish pre-Raphaelite Noel Paton depicts a fairy caravan traveling through a grove with a bounty of stolen children, having left changelings in their stead. It's an enchanting, overtly romantic work, but death and duplicity hide in the shadows, symbolizing the Victorian fear of high childhood mortality."
References
External links
*
The Act of Writing
', article by Alice Thompson
{{DEFAULTSORT:Thompson, Alice
People educated at St George's School, Edinburgh
20th-century Scottish novelists
21st-century Scottish novelists
20th-century Scottish women writers
21st-century Scottish women writers
Living people
Alumni of the University of Oxford
James Tait Black Memorial Prize recipients
Writers from Edinburgh
Scottish keyboardists
Year of birth missing (living people)
Writers of Gothic fiction