Ann Schlee (SCR 1989-1994) passed away on the 1st November 2023, aged 89. Below is an obituary provided to us by her husband.

"Ann Schlee died peacefully at the age of 89 in her home in Upper Basildon, West Berkshire on November 1st. Her work as a novelist includes The Vandal (Macmillan 1979), a novel set in the future. Besides winning the 1979 Guardian Prize it was a commended runner-up for the Carnegie Medal awarded by the Library Association in America.

Her first adult novel, Rhine Journey, was shortlisted for the 1981 Booker Prize. It is to be be reissued next summer by McNally Editions in the USA and Daunt Books in Great Britain.

Jane Gardam, writing about The Time in Aderra (1996), says: ‘She writes historical novels that are more advanced, more interested in feminism, for instance, than her contemporaries who write of the twentieth century … Ann Schlee’s wider vision is adventurous and sunlit’.

She has judged in a number of literary competitions including the Somerset Maugham Award, the David Higham Prize and the Booker Prize.  Subsequently she combined her writing with teaching, becoming a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1997.

Born in Connecticut in 1934, Ann Schlee spent parts of her childhood and adolescence in Egypt, Sudan, Khartoum and Eritrea. She went to boarding school in England and read English at Sommerville College, Oxford. In 1957 married artist Nick Schlee and brought up their four children."