Alice Thompson

Template:Short description {{#invoke:Other people|otherPeople}} Template:EngvarB Template:Use dmy dates Alice Thompson (born in Edinburgh) is a Scottish novelist.<ref>"Alice Thompson: The Scottish Review of Books Interview" Template:Webarchive, Scottish Review of Books. Accessed 16 December 2010.</ref><ref>Holcombe, Garan. "Alice Thompson" Template:Webarchive, British Council. Accessed 24 September 2011.</ref><ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref><ref>Template:Cite news</ref>

Thompson was educated at St George's School, Edinburgh,<ref name=herald>Alice Thompson discovers island life | Herald Scotland Retrieved 7 Jan 2014.</ref> then read English at Oxford University and wrote her Ph.D. thesis on Henry James. In the 1980s she was the keyboard player with rock band The Woodentops.<ref name=herald/> She has a son, and lives in Edinburgh. Her novel Justine was the joint winner of the 1996 James Tait Black Memorial Prize.<ref name=":0">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> She also won a Creative Scotland Award<ref name=":0" /> in 2000, and was a Writer in Residence in Shetland.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

Novels

• Killing Time (1990) - novella
• Justine (1996)
• Pandora's Box (1998)
• Pharos: A Ghost Story (2002)
• The Falconer (2008)
• The Existential Detective (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."<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>

"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."<ref>Template:Cite news</ref>

External links

• The Act of Writing, article by Alice Thompson