Susan Hill
Susan Hill is a British novelist, playwright, screenwriter, journalist, and publisher who writes in English and was born on 5 February 1942 in Scarborough.
Hill was educated at Scarborough Convent School before going on to study at King's College London. Her career has encompassed multiple forms of writing and professional activity, including fiction, journalism, and publishing. Among her notable works are the novel I'm the King of the Castle, The Woman in Black, and The Mist in the Mirror.
Hill has received a number of significant awards and honours across her career. She was awarded the Somerset Maugham Award and the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize in recognition of her fiction. She holds a Fellowship of the Royal Society of Literature and was appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire. She also received the Bram Stoker Award for Lifetime Achievement.
Hill's output spans novels, plays, and screenplays, and her work in crime fiction represents one of the identified strands of her writing. The Bram Stoker Award for Lifetime Achievement stands as a concrete marker of her long-running contribution to that area of literary production.
Quotes by Susan Hill
Certainly with a book, people are going to be able to read it and give themselves permission to have that delicious feeling of being terrified because they're in a safe place while they're reading. That's what you can rely on as a writer, that people can let themselves be really frightened because they're really all right.
It was nine-thirty on Christmas Eve. As I crossed the long entrance hall of Monk’s Piece on my way from the dining room, where we had just enjoyed the first of the happy, festive meals, toward the drawing room and the fire around which my family were now assembled, I paused and then, as I often do in the course of an evening, went to the front door, opened it and stepped outside.
Memory is like a long, dark street, illuminated at intervals in a light so bright that it shows up every detail. And then one plunges into the dark stretch again.
Sometimes a book has its day and, although of course it does not change, the reader does, as a result of having read better things, or new tastes having come to the fore, or fashions in literature having moved on. Other novels seem to have improved, usually because we have matured as readers, our imaginations have expanded and we understand new literary approaches, sometimes because of life events which have opened us up to a new emotional awareness and understanding.
Deep under the earth, inside its cardboard coffin, shrouded in the layers of white paper, the china doll with the jagged open crevasse in its skull was crying.