Jane Gardam

Jane Gardam was an English author known for both children's and adult fiction, as well as literary criticism. She is best known for the Old Filth trilogy, which includes Old Filth (2004), The Man in the Wooden Hat (2009) and Last Friends (2013). She won the Whitbread Award twice and was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 2009.

Jane Gardam was born Jean Mary Pearson on 11 July 1928 in Coatham, North Yorkshire. She was brought up in Cumberland and the North Riding of Yorkshire. A female mobile theatre inspired her as a schoolgirl. At seventeen, she won a scholarship to Bedford College in London and graduated in 1949 with a degree in English. After university, she worked as a Red Cross librarian in hospital libraries and later as a journalist in London.

In 1954, she married David Gardam, a barrister. They settled in Kent, where she brought up their three children. She began to write seriously in her thirties. "I started the morning I took my youngest to his first day at school," she later said. Her first novel, A Long Way from Verona (1971), was a semi-autobiographical story of a young girl's artistic awakening. It marked the beginning of a steady literary output that would last for more than four decades.

Gardam has written 22 novels, 10 collections of stories and a non-fiction book. She also contributed reviews and essays to The Spectator, The Telegraph and BBC Radio. Her work was noted for its range and refusal to follow literary trends. In the UK, she was shortlisted for the 1978 Booker Prize for God on the Rocks. Although she lost out to The Sea, she went on to win the Whitbread Prize for The Hollow Land and The Queen of the Tambourine.

Her breakthrough with American readers came late, in her seventies, with Old Filth. The novel's title, an acronym for "Failed in London, Try Hong Kong", refers to a Raj orphan and an ageing barrister. The trilogy explored memory, regret and human connection. Each book examined the same events from a distinct perspective, crafting a multifaceted and unflinching portrait of lives shaped by colonialism and personal loss.

Other novels include Crusoe's Daughter, Faith Fox, Bilgewater and The Flight of the Maidens. Each reveals Gardam's spare style and interest in childhood, solitude and quiet resilience. "Robinson Crusoe was one of my favourite texts," she once said, and emotional isolation is a frequent theme in her fiction.

Gardam avoided the public literary scene and maintained a private, quiet writing life. Her husband died in 2010; a daughter, Catharine, died in 2011. She continued to write well into her nineties.

Jane Gardam passed away on 28 April 2025, at the age of 96.