Gwendoline Riley

Gwendoline Riley FRSL (born 19 February 1979) is a British writer.

Riley was born in London, England, in 1979. She attended Manchester Metropolitan University.^[1]

Riley's first novel, Cold Water, was named one of the five outstanding debut novels of 2002 by The Guardian "Weekend" magazine and also won a Betty Trask Award.^[2] Sick Notes followed in 2004 and Joshua Spassky in 2007. For Cold Water and Sick Notes, the drama unfolds in Manchester, occasionally extending to different areas of Lancashire. Joshua Spassky, however, is set in Asheville, North Carolina — the town where Zelda Fitzgerald died in a fire at the Highland Hospital. Joshua Spassky won the 2008 Somerset Maugham Award and was shortlisted for the 2007 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. Her fourth novel, Opposed Positions, was published in May 2012. Her fifth novel, First Love, was published in February 2017^[3] and was shortlisted for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction, the Gordon Burn Prize, the Goldsmiths Prize, the Dylan Thomas Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. It won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. Her sixth novel, My Phantoms, published in 2021, was shortlisted for the Folio Prize.

In June 2018 Riley was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in its "40 Under 40" initiative.^[4]

Early life and education