Isabel Quigly

Isabel Madeleine Quigly FRSL (17 September 1926 - 14 September 2018) was a writer, translator and film critic. She was born in Spain and educated at Godolphin School, Salisbury and Newnham College, Cambridge. In her early career, she worked for Penguin Books and Red Cross Geneva. Between 1956 and 1966, she was film critic of The Spectator. She served as literary editor of The Tablet from 1985 to 1997. She has also contributed to numerous journals and newspapers, and served on the jury of various literary prizes including the Booker Prize jury in 1986.[1][2]

Her first book, and only novel, The Eye of Heaven, was published in 1953. Other books include The Heirs of Tom Brown: The English School Story and Charlie Chaplin: Early Comedies. She has also translated more than 100 books from Italian, Spanish and French. Her most notable translations are Silvano Ceccherini's The Transfer, for which, in 1967, she won the John Florio Prize, and Giorgio Bassani's The Garden of the Finzi-Continis. According to Robin Healey's Twentieth-Century Italian Literature in English Translation, Quigly was one of the top 10 translators of Italian literature of the last 70 years, alongside Archibald Colquhoun, Patrick Creagh, Angus Davidson, Frances Frenaye, Stuart Hood, Eric Mosbacher, Raymond Rosenthal, Bernard Wall and William Weaver.[3]