Edward St Aubyn
Edward St Aubyn was born on 14 January 1960, a British citizen whose birthplace is recorded in some sources as London and in others as Cornwall. He writes in English and has worked as both a writer and a journalist over the course of his career. His education took him through Westminster School and then on to Keble College, giving him a grounding in two well-established institutions of English academic life.
St Aubyn has published eleven novels in total. Among them, the Patrick Melrose novels form a semi-autobiographical sequence, drawing on material from his own life. These books represent a significant portion of his output and have been associated with his name more than any other part of his work.
One of those novels, Mother's Milk, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2006. That shortlisting brought the book to the attention of one of the most closely watched prizes in British literary culture and marked a notable point in his career as a novelist.
St Aubyn holds the title of Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a distinction awarded in recognition of contributions to literature. He has also received the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize and the Prix Femina étranger, meaning his work has been recognised through awards in more than one country. These honours, taken together, represent a significant body of recognition for his writing across his career as a UK citizen working in English.
Quotes by Edward St Aubyn
She had brushed her teeth before vomiting as well, never able to utterly crush the optimistic streak in her nature.
She was ghastly and quite mad, but when I grew up I figured her worst punishment was to be herself and I didn’t have to do anything more.
Other people knew what they were meant to say, knew what they were meant to mean, and other people still – otherer people – knew what the other people meant when they said it.
Ninety per cent of the drugs were for him and ten per cent for Natasha, a woman who remained an impenetrable mystery to him during the six months they lived together. The only thing he felt certain about was that she irritated him; but then, who didn’t?
What was the thread that held together the scattered beads of experience if not the pressure of interpretation? The meaning of life was whatever meaning one could thrust down its reluctant throat.
Why was he in this state? Or perhaps the question was why had he not always been in this state? Why had he not always found life so disturbing and so poignant?
The leafless trees, with their black branches stretched hysterically in every direction, looked to him like illustrations of a central nervous system racked by disease: studies of human suffering anatomized against the winter sky.
I’ll let you in on a little secret, Garry: everything is history. By the time you notice it, it’s already happened. That famous imposter, “the present,” disappears in the cognitive gap. Mind the gap!
Balance was so elusive: either it was like this, too fast, or there was the heavy thing like wading through a swamp to get to the end of a sentence.