Elizabeth Lowry
Novelist
About
Elizabeth Lowry is a novelist and critic. Her gothic psychological mystery Dark Water (Quercus, 2018), set in a psychiatric hospital in nineteenth-century Massachusetts, was longlisted for the 2019 Walter Scott prize and the Historical Writers’ Association Gold Crown for fiction award. The Chosen (Quercus, 2022), a portrait of Thomas Hardy’s difficult first marriage and the sudden bereavement that inspired his greatest love poems, was shortlisted for both prizes in 2023.
Since 1995 Elizabeth Lowry has been a regular contributor to a number of journals and papers, including the Times Literary Supplement, the London Review of Books, Literary Review, the Guardian, the Spectator, the Independent, the Telegraph, and the Wall Street Journaland Harper’s Magazine in the USA. She covers literature, biography, sociology, philosophy, art and theatre, writing on subjects from Henry James’s secret injury and Kazuo Ishiguro’s uneasy realism to the most memorable mothers in fiction, and the history of boredom. She has a special interest in English literature from 1820 to the present and has published long essays on Joseph Conrad and J. M. Coetzee in edited volumes.
As a public speaker and panellist Elizabeth has interviewed Hilary Mantel on stage for the LRB, chaired the British Library’s symposium marking the publication of Sylvia Plath’s Letters (Faber, 2019), participated in the BBC’s Arts in Books and Open Book programmes, and is a frequent guest on the TLS podcast. Her current writing project is a novel about the last days of Joan of Arc. She lives and works in Oxfordshire.