Fay Weldon

Fay Weldon (1931-2023) was a British novelist, playwright, and screenwriter born in Birmingham and raised partly in New Zealand, where her father worked as a doctor. She studied psychology and economics at the University of St Andrews before working as a Foreign Office clerk, hospital orderly, and advertising copywriter, experience that fed her satirical eye for domestic and gender politics. Over five decades she published thirty-one novels, most famously The Life and Loves of a She-Devil (1983), along with Puffball, The Cloning of Joanna May, and Chalcot Crescent, and wrote the first episode of Upstairs, Downstairs. Weldon won the Los Angeles Times Fiction Prize and the PEN/Macmillan Silver Pen Award, and was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2001.