Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark, DBE, C.Litt., was born in Edinburgh in 1918 and educated in Scotland. A poet, essayist and novelist, she is most well-known for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and her writing is widely celebrated for its biting wit and satire. Muriel Spark has garnered international praise and many awards, including the David Cohen Prize for Literature, the Ingersoll T.S. Eliot Award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the Boccaccio Prize for European Literature and the Golden PEN Award for a Lifetime’s Service to Literature. She became an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in 1967 and Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1993, in recognition of her services to literature. She died in 2006.



The Driver's Seat cover

Listen to an extract of Muriel Spark’s The Driver’s Seat, read by Dame Judi Dench.

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If I had my life to live over again, I would form the habit of nightly composing myself to thoughts of death. I would practice, as it were, the remembrance of death.

Memento Mori

Muriel Spark