Ann Quin

17 March 1936 - 18 August 1973

Standard Name: Quin, Ann

Birth Name: Ann Marie Quin

AQ was one of the less-known English experimental writers of the 1960s. She has been likened to Graham Greene , Nathalie Sarraute , Samuel Beckett , Robert Creeley , Virginia Woolf , and Anna Kavan , among others. Such a spectrum of comparisons indicates both her originality and the difficulty she poses to critics who would place her neatly in standard categories. Over her short career, she produced four novels that enjoy a small but diligent following. Though each of these displays increasing formal innovation, certain themes persist through all of them, including searching and stalking, triangular relationships, and the fragility of identity.

Evenson, Brian, and Ann Quin. “Introduction”. Three, Dalkey Archive, p. vii - xiii.

vii

Gordon, Giles, editor. Beyond the Words. Hutchinson.

251

Full profile

Connections

Connections Sort descending	Author name	Excerpt
Intertextuality and Influence	Deborah Levy	By 2018 DL had written three books in Celia Hewitt 's garden shed, an inviolable space where nobody was allowed to disturb her. Levy, Deborah. “’What’s the point of a risk-free life?’—Deborah Levy on starting again at 50”. theguardian.com. She mentions her debts to women writers like Marguerite Duras , Virginia Woolf
Material Conditions of Writing	Muriel Spark	MS began her career as a novelist in illness and under financial stress. In 1954, Macmillan , who were looking for promising new writers, invited her to write a novel. Although ill and unable to...
Occupation	Rebecca West	The prize went to P. H. Newby 's Something to Answer For, which according to Kermode years later was a compromise decision. Dame Rebecca didn't dislike it as much as nearly all the others...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text	Nell Dunn	Her interviewees are young women (the oldest is Edna O'Brien at thirty-two), many with small children, many trying to make it as writers or artists (two of the most trenchant interviews were given by O'Brien...

Timeline

1965

Giles Gordon did a series of interviews for The Scotsman with female authors: a species of writer that at the time wasn't particularly recognised, although it certainly had been in the previous century.

By early November 1973

Experimental novelist B. S. Johnson prefaced his short-story volume Aren't You Rather Young To Be Writing Your Memoirs? with a polemical critique listing only sixteen serious contemporary British writers.

Texts

Quin, Ann. Berg. John Calder, 1964.

Gordon, Giles, and Ann Quin. “Introduction”. Berg, 1st Dalkey Archive edition, Dalkey Archive, 2001, p. vii - xiv.

Evenson, Brian, and Ann Quin. “Introduction”. Three, Dalkey Archive, 2001, p. vii - xiii.

Quin, Ann. “Introduction”. The Unmapped Country: Stories and Fragments, edited by Jennifer Hodgson, And Other Stories, 2018, pp. 7-12.

Quin, Ann. “Leaving School—XI”. London Magazine, Vol.

new series 6

, pp. 63-8.

Quin, Ann. Passages. Calder and Boyars, 1969.

Quin, Ann. The Unmapped Country. Stories and Fragments. Editor Hodgson, Jennifer, And Other Stories, 2018.

Quin, Ann. Three. Calder and Boyars, 1966.

Quin, Ann, and Carol Annand. Tripticks. Calder and Boyars, 1972.