Carol Birch is an English novelist.
Birch’s parents had met in a wartime armaments factory. Her father, a metallurgist, also played trombone in a Manchester jazz band known as The Saints. She took English and American Studies at Keele University. She currently lives with her family in Lancaster where her husband teaches at Lancaster and Morecambe College
The author of thirteen novels, Birch won the 1988 David Higham Award for the Best First Novel of the Year, Life in the Palace, and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize with The Fog Line in 1991.
Her novel Turn Again Home was long-listed for the 2003 Man Booker Prize. Her novel Jamrach’s Menagerie was long-listed for the Orange Prize 2011, and shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.
The book was also excerpted in The New York Times
Novels by Carol Birch:
Life in the Palace (1988)
The Fog Line (1989)
The Unmaking (1992)
Songs of the West (1994)
Little Sister (1998)
Come Back, Paddy Riley (1999)
Turn Again Home (2003)
In a Certain Light (2004)
The Naming of Eliza Quinn(2005)
Scapegallows (2007)
Jamrach’s Menagerie (2011)
Orphans of the Carnival (2016)
Cold Boy’s Wood (2021)
Her most recent novel, Shadow Girls, was published in April 2022