- Salley Vickers
Salley Vickers is an English novelist whose works include the word-of-mouth bestseller "Miss Garnet's Angel','"Mr Golightly's Holiday'","'The Other Side of You'" and "'Where Three Roads Meet'", a retelling of the Oedipus myth to Sigmund Freud in the last months of his life. Her books touch on big philosophical themes of religion, art, creativity and death. She also writes poetry.
She was born in
Liverpool in 1958. Her mother was a social worker and her father a trades union leader, both members of the British communist party until 1956 and then very committed socialists. She was brought up inStoke-on-Trent andLondon , and read English Literature atCambridge University . Following this, she taught children with special needs and then English literature at Stanford, Oxford and theOpen University and was a WEA and further reducation tutor for adult education classes.She then trained as an Jungian analytical psychotherapist, working in the NHS and also specialised in helping people who were creatively blocked. She gave up her psychoanalytic work in 2002, although she still lectures on the connections between literature and psychology. She now writes full time and lives in London.
Her father was a committed supporter of Irish republicanism and her first name, "Salley", is spelled with an 'e' because it is the Irish for '
willow ' (from the Latin: salix, salicis) as in the W B Yeats poem, "Down by the salley gardens".She has two sons from her first marriage. In 2002, her second marriage, to the Irish writer and broadcaster
Frank Delaney , broke up.Novels
*Miss Garnet’s Angel (first published 2000)
*Instances of the Number 3 (2001)
*Mr Golightly’s Holiday (2003)
*The Other Side of You (2006)
*Sweet and Comfortable Words (2006)
*Nice ’n’ Easy (2007)
*Where Three Roads Meet (2007) (part of theCanongate Myth Series )External links
* [http://www.philosophersnet.com/magazine/printer_friendly.php?id=997 My Philosophy: Salley Vickers (Interview by Julian Baggini)]
* [http://www.bracknell-forest.gov.uk/learning/learn-libraries/learn-libraries-authors/learn-libraries-events-2007/learn-libraries-events-070427-vickers.htm Interview and photographs]
* [http://us.penguingroup.com/static/rguides/us/miss_garnets_angel.html Feature on Penguin Reading Groups]
* [http://www.readinggroups.co.uk/Authors/Interview.aspx?id=705&aid=5902 An interview with Salley Vickers]
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