Lucy Ellmann

Lucy Ellmann is an American-British novelist born in Evanston, Illinois in 1956, the daughter of literary critic Richard Ellmann. She has lived in Scotland for much of her adult life. Her debut novel Sweet Desserts appeared in 1988, followed by Varying Degrees of Hopelessness (1991), Man or Mango? (1998), Dot in the Universe (2003), Doctors & Nurses (2006), and Mimi (2011). Her seventh novel, Ducks, Newburyport (2019), is an extraordinary single-sentence work running to over a thousand pages, following the consciousness of an Ohio woman as it streams across domesticity, politics, ecology, and cultural memory. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, won the Goldsmiths Prize, and won the James Tait Black Prize for Fiction. The novel was widely read as a feminist and political act, its associative structure enacting resistance to patriarchal linearity. Ellmann's work is consistently satirical, politically engaged, and formally innovative, placing her in a tradition of experimental fiction that ranges from Sterne to Woolf to Beckett. She lives in Edinburgh.