Ruth Thomas (novelist)

Last updated
Ruth Thomas
Born (1967-07-07) 7 July 1967 (age 54)
Horsmonden, Kent, England
Occupation Novelist
NationalityBritish
Period1994–present
GenreLiterary fiction, Short Stories
Notable worksThings to Make and Mend, Super Girl, The Home Corner
Website
ruth-thomas.com

Ruth Thomas (born 7 July 1967 in Horsmonden, Kent) is a British writer of novels and short stories.

Contents

Biography

Thomas studied English literature at the University of Edinburgh, then worked in various administrative jobs in the private and voluntary sector before turning to writing. Her first collection of short stories, Sea Monster Tattoo, was shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and the Scottish Best First Book of the Year Award. Her second collection, The Dance Settee won a Scottish Arts Council Book Award. Both books were published by Polygon, which is now an imprint of Birlinn Limited. Her first novel, Things to Make and Mend, was published in 2007 by Faber and won a Good Housekeeping Book Award (Most Entertaining Read). Her latest collection of short stories, Super Girl, was published in 2009 also by Faber. Rock of Ages from that collection was runner up for the 2009 V. S. Pritchett memorial prize of the Royal Society of Literature. Her second novel, The Home Corner, was published in 2013.

Thomas lives in Edinburgh with her three children and husband, Mike Norman.

Works

Novels

Collections of short stories

Ruth Thomas has been anthologised in collections since 1990. Her stories appear regularly on BBC Radio.

Related Research Articles

Rohinton Mistry is an Indian-born Canadian writer. He has been the recipient of many awards including the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 2012. Each of his first three novels were shortlisted for the Booker Prize. His novels to date have been set in India, told from the perspective of Parsis, and explore themes of family life, poverty, discrimination, and the corrupting influence of society.

Maurice Gee New Zealand novelist

Maurice Gough Gee is a New Zealand novelist. He is one of New Zealand's most distinguished and prolific authors, having written over thirty novels for adults and children, and has won numerous awards both in New Zealand and overseas, including multiple top prizes at the New Zealand Book Awards, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in the UK, the Katherine Mansfield Menton Fellowship, the Robert Burns Fellowship and a Prime Minister's Award for Literary Achievement. In 2003 he was recognised as one of New Zealand's greatest living artists across all disciplines by the Arts Foundation of New Zealand, which presented him with an Icon Award.

Guy Clarence Vanderhaeghe is a Canadian novelist and short story writer, best known for his Western novel trilogy, The Englishman's Boy, The Last Crossing, and A Good Man set in the 19th-century American and Canadian West. Vanderhaeghe has won three Governor General's Awards for his fiction, one for his short story collection Man Descending in 1982, the second for his novel The Englishman's Boy in 1996, and the third for his short story collection Daddy Lenin and Other Stories in 2015.

Michel Faber Dutch writer

Michel Faber is a Dutch-born writer of English-language fiction, including his 2002 novel The Crimson Petal and the White. His latest book is a novel for young adults, D: A Tale of Two Worlds, published in 2020.

Olive Marjorie Senior is a Jamaican poet, novelist, short story and non-fiction writer based in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. She was awarded the Musgrave Gold Medal in 2005 by the Institute of Jamaica for her contributions to literature.

Lee Smith is an American fiction author who typically incorporates much of her background from the Southeastern United States in her works. She has received writing awards, such as the O. Henry Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Fiction, the North Carolina Award for Literature, and, in April 2013, was the first recipient of Mercer University's Sidney Lanier Prize for Southern Literature. Her novel The Last Girls was listed on the New York Times bestseller's list and won the Southern Book Critics Circle Award. Mrs Darcy and the Blue-Eyed Stranger, a collection of new and selected stories, was published in 2010.

Ali Smith Scottish author and journalist

Ali Smith CBE FRSL is a Scottish author, playwright, academic and journalist. Sebastian Barry described her in 2016 as "Scotland's Nobel laureate-in-waiting".

Piers Paul Read FRSL is a British novelist, historian and biographer. He was first noted in 1974 for a book of reportage Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors, later adapted as a feature-film and a documentary. Read was educated at St. John's College, Cambridge, where he studied history.

Nicholas Laird is a Northern Irish novelist and poet.

Madeleine Thien

Madeleine Thien is a Canadian short story writer and novelist. The Oxford Handbook of Canadian Literature has considered her work as reflecting the increasingly trans-cultural nature of Canadian literature, exploring art, expression and politics inside Cambodia and China, as well as within diasporic Asian communities. Thien's critically acclaimed novel, Do Not Say We Have Nothing, won the 2016 Governor General's Award for English-language fiction, the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and the Edward Stanford Travel Writing Awards for Fiction. It was shortlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize, the 2017 Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction, and the 2017 Rathbones Folio Prize. Her books have been translated into more than 25 languages.

Keith Ridgway is an Irish novelist. An author, he has been described as "a worthy inheritor" of "the modernist tradition in Irish fiction."

Claire Keegan Irish writer (born 1968)

Claire Keegan is an Irish writer known for her award-winning short stories. Her stories have been published in The New Yorker, Best American Short Stories, Granta, and The Paris Review; and translated into 20 languages.

Sarah Hall is an English novelist and short story writer. Her critically acclaimed second novel, The Electric Michelangelo, was nominated for the 2004 Man Booker Prize. She lives in Cumbria.

Jennifer Sheila Uglow is an English biographer, historian, critic and publisher. She was an editorial director of Chatto & Windus. She has written critically acclaimed biographies of Elizabeth Gaskell, William Hogarth, Thomas Bewick, and Edward Lear, and a history and joint biography of the Lunar Society, among others, and has also compiled The Macmillan Dictionary of Women's Biography.

Lucy Caldwell is a Northern Irish playwright and novelist. She was the winner of the 2021 BBC National Short Story Award.

Jim Crace English writer and novelist

James Crace is an English writer and novelist. His novels include Quarantine, which was judged Whitbread Novel of 1998, and Harvest, which won the 2015 International Dublin Literary Award, the 2013 James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and was shortlisted for the 2013 Booker Prize.

Jenny Erpenbeck German writer and opera director

Jenny Erpenbeck is a German writer and opera director, recipient of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize.

Belinda McKeon is an Irish writer. She is the author of two novels, Solace, which won the 2011 Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, and Tender (2015).

Katherine Rundell is an English author and academic. She is the author of Rooftoppers, which in 2015 won both the overall Waterstones Children's Book Prize and the Blue Peter Book Award for Best Story, and was short-listed for the Carnegie Medal. She is a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford and has appeared as an expert guest on BBC Radio 4 programmes including Start the Week, Poetry Please, and Seriously....

Chibundu Onuzo Nigerian novelist

Imachibundu Oluwadara Onuzo is a Nigerian novelist. Her first novel, The Spider King's Daughter, won a Betty Trask Award, was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize and the Commonwealth Book Prize, and was longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize and the Etisalat Prize for Literature.

References