Paula Fox (1923 – 2017)

She was awarded the Newbury Medal in 1974 for her book The Slave Dancer, a controversial novel about the trans-Atlantic Slave trade in the mid-19th century. Her book Desperate Characters (1970) about the dissolution of a marriage was made into a movie of the same name starring Shirley MacLaine. This book enjoyed a resurgence of popularity after Jonathan Franzen read an out-of-print copy and became an ardent champion of the work – writing the introduction to a reprint edition published in 1999. Other books by Fox were then republished as well including The Widow’s Children (first published 1976), A Servant’s Tale (first published 1984), and The God of Nightmares (first published 1990). Fox's memoir, Borrowed Finery (2001), was written after an arduous recovery from a mugging. Borrowed Finery tells the story of her troubled childhood when she was left by her parents who deemed a child a troublesome thing, and herself gave up a child at the age of 20 after a divorce. Her biological child, Linda Carroll, is the mother of the singer Courtney Love.