Rachel Seiffert

Rachel Seiffert (born 1971) is a British novelist and short story writer.

Biography

She was born in 1971 in Oxford^[1] to German and Australian parents, and was brought up bilingually. She currently lives in London.^[2]

Publications and awards

Seiffert has published three works of fiction to date:

The Dark Room (2001) is a novel, shortlisted for the Booker Prize^[3] and the Guardian First Book Award in 2001, winner of the LA Times Prize for First Fiction and a Betty Trask Award in 2002.^[4]

Field Study (2004) is a collection of short stories, one of which received an award from International PEN.

Afterwards (2007) is a novel, long-listed for the Orange Prize for Fiction the same year.

Seiffert was named as one of Granta's 20 Best of Young British Novelists in 2003, and her short story Field Study was included in the subsequent collection.^[5]

In 2011, she received the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Her books have been translated into ten languages.

Subjects

Seiffert's subject is the individual in history: how political and economic upheavals impact on ordinary lives. Her characters have included the 12-year-old daughter of an SS officer in 1945, a Polish seasonal worker on a German asparagus farm after the fall of the wall, and a London painter and decorator who killed a civilian as a 19-year-old squaddie with the British Army in Northern Ireland.

References