PENGUIN MODERN CLASSICS
J. L. Carr was born in 1912 and attended the village school at Carlton Miniott, North Yorkshire, and Castleford Grammar School. For many years a head teacher at a primary school in Kettering, he left teaching in 1967 to set up a small publishing imprint called the Quince Tree Press which published standard poets in a series of ‘Pocket Books’, idiosyncratic historical county maps and unlikely dictionaries in order to support the writing of further fiction.
He published eight novels altogether: A Day in Summer (1964); A Season in Sinji (1967); The Harpole Report (1972); How Steeple Sinderby Wanderers Won the FA Cup (1975); A Month in the Country (1980), which won the Guardian Fiction Prize and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize; The Battle of Pollocks Crossing (1985), which was also shortlisted for the Booker Prize; What Hetty Did (1988) and Harpole & Foxberrow, General Publishers (1992).
J. L. Carr died in Northamptonshire in 1994 but the Quince Tree Press continues to be run as a back-bedroom business by his family and has kept all the novels available in his own editions.
Penelope Fitzgerald’s novels included Offshore (1979; winner of the Booker Prize), The Beginning of Spring (1988) and The Blue Flower (1995). A collection of short stories, The Means of Escape, was published posthumously. Penelope Fitzgerald died in April 2000.