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July 31, 2004
Moving to the Top of the Beatrice Reading Pile...
by Ron HoganI actually was pretty excited to get my advance copy of Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell at BookExpo last month, and I'm not terribly surprised to see the momentum for Susanna Clarke building, with a NYT magazine profile nearly two months before the official pub date. And though I know the focus is all on her, there's one aspect of her personal life with science-fiction critic Colin Greenland (who "discovered" her in one of his classes) that I wouldn't hearing more about:
She fell in love with Greenland and coaxed him up to Cambridge from London, where he had been living for years in a house known for having no heating and being a sort of colony for science-fiction writers.
Anybody know which ones? Comment away!
This must be Ortygia House... And a google search turns up Christopher Priest's web page on it, which gives a few names. And it looks like Lisa Tuttle wrote an essay about her memories of it as some point, too.
Posted by: gwenda at July 31, 2004 11:42 PMHave you read the book yet? I was intrigued by it, based on the NYT profile (although I'm unlikely to read the hardcover, since most of my reading time is during my commute, and 700+ pages don't make for easy subway reading).
Posted by: Michael Dietsch at August 2, 2004 11:29 AMThe Ortygia house in Harrow was inhabited, at various times, by Chris Priest, Lisa Tuttle and Chris Evans (probably amongst many others). I also think that John Brosnan (ex-Australian fan, writer and movie critic) may also have lived there once, but I'm away from my fanzine collection and can't check the old addresses. Dave Langford tells me that a number of people got together in the early 1990s to produce a "memoir" of the house that was published in INTERZONE. He thinks it was in about 1993.
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