“If
I've got one thing that I really believe about fiction and life, it's that
there are no minor characters.” – Jane Gardam
Born on this date in 1928, Gardam has numerous writing honors including two of
Britain’s prestigious Whitbread Awards for Best Novel – The Queen of the
Tambourine and the children’s
book The Hollow Land. Many of her award-winning short stories can be found in 2014's The Stories of Jane Gardam.
A journalist first,
she did not publish her first book until she was in her 40s. Since then she’s become one of the most
prolific writers of her generation, with 30 books, numerous short stories and
many journalistic pieces on her resumé. Her novel Old Filth was voted one of the "100 Best British Novels" in a 2015 BBC survey.
Writing, she said, has been in her blood
since she was a little girl. 
“I started to write as a child as soon as I
could read, or even before, when my mother read me Beatrix Potter at bedtime,”
she said. “Writing seemed to me to be the only sensible way to live and be
happy. I
just knew I would be a writer. It just seemed the only sensible thing to do."
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