Claire Tomalin

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Claire Tomalin (born 20 June 1933) is an English biographer and journalist. She studied at Newnham College, Cambridge.

She was literary editor of the New Statesman and of the Sunday Times, and has written several noted biographies. Her work has been recognised with the award of the 1990 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for The Invisible Woman: The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens. Her biography of Samuel Pepys won the Whitbread Book Award in 2002, the Rose Mary Crawshay Prize in 2003, the Latham Prize of the Samuel Pepys Club in 2003, and was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize in 2003.

Tomalin's first husband Nicholas Tomalin, a prominent journalist, was killed in the Arab-Israeli Yom Kippur War in 1973; she is now married to the novelist and playwright Michael Frayn.

Selected works

• Thomas Hardy: The Time-Torn Man, 2007, ISBN 978-1594201189
• Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self, (New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 2002), ISBN 0-670-88568-1 or ISBN 0-14-028234-3
• Jane Austen: A Life, 2000, ISBN 0-14-029690-5
• Several Strangers; writing from three decades, 1999, Viking, London.
• Katherine Mansfield: A Secret Life, (London, Viking, 1987)1998, ISBN 0-14-011715-6
• Mrs. Jordan's Profession: The Story of a Great Actress and a Future King, 1995, ISBN 0-14-015923-1
• Shelley and His World, 1992, ISBN 978-0140171525
• The Invisible Woman: The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens, (New York, Knopf, 1991), ISBN 0-14-012136-
• The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft (London, Weidenfeld & Nicolsen, 1974), 1992, ISBN 0-14-016761-7

Further reading

• 'Aida Edemariam meets Claire Tomalin' The Guardian 18 November 2006
• 'Claire Tomalin: a Life in Words' BBC World News, Entertainment, 29 Jan 2003
• Claire Tomalin at www.contemporarywriters

Trivia

She made a number of tongue-in-cheek criticisms against the Samuel Pepys Wikipedia article in The Guardian on 24 October 2005, awarding the page a score of 6/10.^[1] On the 4th April 2009, Tomalin wrote in to The Guardian and expressed facts on Thomas Hardy's life. The letter was titled "A Poet to the End".

Notes