Michèle Roberts

Michèle Brigitte Roberts FRSL (born 20 May 1949) is a British writer, novelist and poet. She is the daughter of a French Catholic teacher mother (Monique Caulle) and English Protestant father (Reginald Roberts), and has dual UK–France nationality.

Early life Roberts was born to a French Catholic mother and English Protestant father in Bushey, Hertfordshire, England, but was raised in Edgware, Middlesex. She was educated at a convent, expecting to become a nun, before reading English at Somerville College, Oxford, where she lost her Catholic faith. She also studied at University College London, training to be a librarian. She worked for the British Council in Bangkok, Thailand, in this role from 1973 to 1974.

Career Active in socialist and feminist politics (the Women's Liberation Movement) since the early 1970s, she formed a writers' collective with Sara Maitland, Michelene Wandor and Zoe Fairbairns. At this time, Roberts was the Poetry Editor (1975–77) at Spare Rib, the feminist magazine, and later at City Limits (1981–83). Her first novel, A Piece of the Night, was published in 1978. Her 1992 novel Daughters of the House was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and won the 1993 WH Smith Literary Award.

Paper Houses, a memoir of her life since 1970, was published in 2007: "Drawing on her diaries of the period, she brings back a more political, though also hedonistic era of radical feminism, communes and demonstrations. And the friendships she made and has kept ever since, notably with fellow feminist writers such as Sara Maitland, Micheline Wandor and Alison Fell. Roberts also self-analyzes the effects of her Anglo-French family’s Catholicism ('the nun in my head, that monstrous Mother Superior'), which have remained a fertile source, even as she reacted against its overt doctrines. Her exploration of London, the various areas and houses that she lived in, went alongside her development as a writer. For her, writing 'meant voyaging into the unknown and having adventures' though also 'bearing witness to other people’s stories as well as my own'."

In her 2020 work, Negative Capability: A Diary of Surviving, Roberts documents a period of crisis following the rejection of a novel she was writing by her publisher and agent. The title is taken from a quotation by Keats.

Roberts is an Emeritus Professor of Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia and was visiting professor in Writing at Nottingham Trent University for several years.

Honours and recognition

Roberts was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1999. She is a Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, awarded by the French government, but turned down an OBE as a consequence of her republican views.

Publications

Essays Food, Sex & God: on Inspiration and Writing, 1998, Virago Press

Novels A Piece of the Night, 1978, Women's Press The Visitation, 1983, Women's Press The Wild Girl (also known as The Secret Gospel of Mary Magdalene), 1984, Methuen The Book of Mrs Noah, 1987, Methuen In the Red Kitchen, 1990, Methuen Daughters of the House, 1992, Virago and Morrow (USA) Flesh & Blood, 1994, Virago Impossible Saints, 1998, Ecco Press Fair Exchange, 1999, Little, Brown The Looking Glass, 2000, Little, Brown The Mistressclass, 2002, Little, Brown Reader, I Married Him, 2006, Little, Brown Ignorance, 2012, Bloomsbury Publishing The Walworth Beauty, 2017, Bloomsbury Cut Out, 2021, Sandstone Press,

Poetry Touch Papers: Three Women Poets (with Michelene Wandor and Judith Kazantzis), 1982, Allison and Busby The Mirror of the Mother, 1986, Methuen Psyche and the Hurricane , 1991, Methuen All the Selves I Was, 1995, Virago

Short stories Your Shoes, 1991 During Mother's Absence, 1993, Virago How Maxine Learned to Love her Legs: And Other Short Stories, 1995, Aurora Metro Books Playing Sardines, 2001, Virago Mud: Stories of Sex and Love, 2010, Virago

Memoir Paper Houses: A Memoir of the 70s and Beyond, 2007, Virago, ; paperback 2008, Negative Capability: A Diary of Surviving, 2020, Sandstone Press,