Tessa Hadley – Year of election 2009

Tessa Hadley came comparatively late to writing, publishing her first two books, her novel Accidents in the Home and a critical work, Henry James and the Imagination of Pleasure, in 2002, when she was in her late forties. She had first, “briefly and disastrously”, trained as a schoolteacher. She started to write when she had babies, initially some children’s stories, and “got very good” she says “at seizing any stretch of time available and not wasting it”. She wrote stories and novels, but couldn’t get them right. It wasn’t until she took an MA in Creative Writing at Bath Spa University, and studied for a PhD on the novels of Henry James, that she found her feet in her own writing. She has since published two more novels, Everything Will Be All Right and The Master Bedroom, and a collection of short stories, Sunstroke. She publishes stories regularly in The New Yorker.

The Guardian’s critic Julie Myerson said of Accidents in the Home: “Hadley's book is a match for almost any current critically lauded novel you could name. In fact, you have to wonder whether, if she was male and American and the book was twice as heavy, she wouldn't have the whole of the chattering classes falling at her feet.”