Discover the Best Books Written by 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 began Jonathan Strange in 1993 and worked on it during her spare time. 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.

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

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 afterward was inspired to "[try] writing a novel of magic and fantasy."

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. Before attending, the students were expected to prepare a short story, 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 practicing magic who the famous Jonathan Strange discovers. 

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