People like Ann Quin

Ann Quin (17 March 1936 – 27 August 1973) was a British writer noted for her experimental style. The author of Berg (1964), Three (1966), Passages (1969) and Tripticks (1972), she died by drowning in 1973 at the age of 37.

Quin was born in Brighton, Sussex, in March 1936, in a family on the fringes of the working-class and lower-middle class. Her father, former opera singer Nicholas Montague Quin, left the family, and she was raised by her mother Ann (née Reid) alone.

She was educated at a Roman Catholic school, the Convent of the Blessed Sacrament in Brighton, until the age of 17. She trained as a shorthand typist and worked in a solicitor's office, then at a publishing company as a manuscript reader and as secretary to the foreign publishing rights manager, after which she moved to Soho and began writing novels. In 1964-65 Quin had an affair with Henry Williamson, the fascist novelist who wrote Tarka the Otter, and who was some forty years her senior. Williamson portrayed her as Laura Wissilcraft in his novel The Gale of the World.