Shena Mackay


Shena Mackay FRSL is a Scottish novelist born in Edinburgh. She was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction in 1996 for The Orchard on Fire, and was shortlisted for the Whitbread Prize and the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2003 for Heligoland.

Biography

Mackay was born in Edinburgh, Scotland. After the war her family moved to Hampstead, London, and eventually settled in Shoreham in Kent, from where she attended Tonbridge Grammar School. Her writing career started with her winning a poetry competition in the Daily Mirror at the age of 16, while still at school. After leaving school she began working in an office, before getting a job at an antique shop in Chancery Lane. The antique shop was owned by the parents of art critic David Sylvester, with whom Mackay had her daughter Cecily.
Mackay's first publication, in 1964, was a volume of two novellas, Dust Falls on Eugene Schlumburger and Toddler on the Run.
In 1965 she published her first novel, Music Upstairs, set in London in the early 1960s.
She won the Fawcett Society Fiction Prize in 1986 for her novel Redhill Rococo and the Scottish Arts Council Book Award for her 1991 novel, Dunedin.
Her novel The Orchard on Fire was published in 1995 and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction. The novel is set in the 1950s and focuses on April, an eight-year-old girl from Streatham who is forced to move to Kent when her parents decide to run a tearoom.
Her 2003 novel Heligoland was shortlisted for the Whitbread Prize and the Orange Prize for Fiction.
She holds a Fellowship of the Royal Society of Literature and is also Honorary Visiting Professor at Middlesex University. In an interview with The Telegraph in 2004 Mackay explained that she is synaesthetic and "sees words as colours", her own name being yellow.
She married Robin Brown in 1966 and they brought up her three daughters, Sarah Clark, Rebecca Smith and painter Cecily Brown. Her daughter Cecily was not told that Sylvester was her father until she was an adult. Mackay and Brown later divorced and she moved back to London. As of 2008 lives in Southampton. She is in favour of an independent Scotland.

Works