The Pink Lights

Shortlisted for the Booker, the Whitbread Prize and the Women's Prize for Fiction, Shena Mackay has been one of the UK's most fascinating writers for over sixty years Born in Edinburgh, she grew up in Kent and came to fame before she was twenty when she published Dust Falls on Eugene Schlumberger & Toddler on the Run, two novellas written in her teens. Since then, she has published nine much-heralded novels and seven collections of short stories. Now, she has written her first nonfiction, a short memoir*, The Pink Lights* and it's as dazzling, touching and as brilliantly observed as any of her wonderful novels. Hers is a life well lived and characterised by luck and love. A peripatetic childhood was balanced by her mother's love of literature and music; at her mother's suggestion, and encouraged by an English teacher, she entered a poem for a Daily Mirror poetry competition, for which she won a prize. But because Shena had abandoned school at sixteen, the £25 prize had to be squandered on pleated skirts and cardigans,' as she had to find employment. The job that changed her life was in an antique shop in Chancery Lane in London, owned by the parents of David Sylvester, the art critic. There she worked alongside the playwright Frank Marcus, best known for The Killing of Sister George and it was Marcus who read her first novella and introduced her to an agent and her first publisher. Through her friendship with David, she met many of the 20th century's most celebrated artists including Giacometti, Henry Moore, Frank Auerbach and David Hockney. And in Soho, in Muriel's infamous Colony Room, she met Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon among others. But writing, marriage and motherhood took precedence and in the early 1970s she moved to the country with her husband and three children, re-emerging in the 1980s with a collection of stories, followed by more works including the Booker Shortlisted novel, The Orchard on Fire.