Clare Colvin

Clare Colvin is an acclaimed novelist and short-story writer, whose fiction focuses on themes of history, music and art. Her first novel A Fatal Season (Duckworth, 1996), a cautionary tale about the perils of role-playing, was set in the London theatre in the mid-1980s. Her second Masque of the Gonzagas (Arcadia, 1999) was set in 17th-century Mantua and Venice at the time of Claudio Monteverdi, the composer of early opera. It has been translated into five European languages and is now published as an ebook. Her third novel The Mirror Makers (Hutchinson/Arrow, 2003), for which she received an Arts Council writers’ award, was set in the court of King Louis XIV during the building of Versailles.

Colvin’s short stories have been published in anthologies, including Constable’s Winter’s Tales and Robson’s Mammoth Book of Ghost Stories, by Duckworth and Serpent’s Tail, as well as in literary magazines. She was runner-up in the V.S. Pritchett short-story awards in 2012 for her short story ‘Sehr Schon’. She has taught creative writing, specialising in short stories and novels, at Goldsmiths and Birkbeck colleges.

Before writing fiction, Clare Colvin worked as a journalist, theatre critic and arts feature-writer for several national newspapers. For several years she has been the opera critic for the Sunday Express, and a regular book reviewer for the Daily Mail. She is currently researching a memoir based on family papers, about Berlin in the years before the second world war.