Ann Quin

Ann Quin (17 March 1936 – 27 August 1973) was a British writer noted for her experimental style.

She was educated at a Roman Catholic school, the Convent of the Blessed Sacrament in Brighton, until the age of 17. She trained as a shorthand typist and worked in a solicitor's office, then at a publishing company as a manuscript reader and as secretary to the foreign publishing rights manager,

She had bouts of mental illness, suffering a breakdown whilst working in a hotel in Cornwall, and later receiving electro-shock treatment.

Career Quin is associated with a loosely constituted circle of 'experimental' authors in Sixties Britain, headed by B. S. Johnson and including Stefan Themerson, Rayner Heppenstall, Alan Burns and Eva Figes, influenced by Samuel Beckett and recent French fiction (Marguerite Duras, Alain Robbe-Grillet). They stood in opposition to the dominant tendency for social realism, manifest from John Osborne and John Wain to Karl Miller's Writing in England Today (Penguin, 1968).

Her first novel, Berg, was published by Calder & Boyars in 1964. It was influenced by Virginia Woolf, Anna Kavan and other female British modernists, as well as the French nouveau roman. Pop artist Billy Apple has stated that his then-partner Quin was the ghost-writer of his thesis.

In August 2022, Danielle Dutton published an article in The New Yorker praising Quin's work, especially how Tripticks satirizes the beatnik culture.

Works

Berg (Calder & Boyars, 1964; Dalkey Archive, 2001; And Other Stories, 2019, ) Three (Calder & Boyars, 1966; Dalkey Archive, 2005; And Other Stories, 2020, ) Passages (Calder & Boyars, 1969; Dalkey Archive, 2003; And Other Stories, 2021, ) Tripticks (Calder & Boyars, 1972; Dalkey Archive, 2002; And Other Stories, 2022, ) The Unmapped Country: Stories and Fragments, ed. Jennifer Hodgson (And Other Stories, 2018, )

Adaptations of her work Berg was adapted for film in 1989 as Killing Dad, starring Denholm Elliott and Richard E. Grant.