Janice Galloway
(born March 1956 - ) - Saltcoats, Ayrshire
Janice Galloway scored an immediate success – and critical acclaim – with her debut novel The Trick is to Keep Breathing. The story of a young drama teacher’s descent into insanity in a working-class housing estate sets the hard-hitting and confrontational tone central to her later short story collections and novels. The collections Blood and Where You Find It won the EM Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. More recently she has turned her pen to strong historical women, with an opera based on the life of Mary Shelley (Monster, with Sally Beamish), and Clara, based on the life of 19th-century pianist Clara Weick Schumann.
Janice Galloway studied Music and English at Glasgow University, and now lives and works in Glasgow.
Key titles
- Blood
The Trick is to Keep Breathing, the first novel from Ayrshire-born Janice Galloway, won the MIND/Allen Lane Book of the Year and was shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel prize. - Clara
Janice Galloway's new novel is based on the life of Clara Schumann - 19th century concert pianist and composer, editor and teacher, friend of Brahms - who was also the wife of Robert Schumann, the mother of his eight children, and the woman who cared for him through crippling mental illness. - Foreign Parts
Foreign Parts is a novel about love, mortality and travel. Two women drive each other round the bend as they journey in Normandy on a holiday that tests the limits of human affection and the territory of a woman's life. - The Trick Is To Keep Breathing
From the author of Foreign Parts, Where You Find It and Blood comes the story of Joy, a heroine struggling for order and meaning in her life. First published in 1989, this novel won the MIND/Allen Lane Book of the Year.
Bibliography
- The Trick is to Keep Breathing - 1989
- Blood - 1991
- Foreign Parts - 1994
- Where You Find It - 1996
- Chute (play) (1998)
- Clara - 2002