Salley Vickers

Vickers was born in Liverpool. Her year of birth was thought to be 1948, but an article[1] about her in April 2020 gave her age as 70, which suggests she was born in 1949 or 1950. Her mother, Freddie, was a social worker and her father, J.O.N. Vickers, a trades union leader, were both members of the British communist party until 1956. They were friends of J.B.S. Haldane and T.H.White had taught her father English at school.[2] They then became committed socialists.[3]

Her father was a committed supporter of Irish republicanism and her first name, 'Salley', is spelled with an 'e' because it is the Irish for 'willow' (cognate with Latin: salix, salicis) as in the W B Yeats poem, "Down by the Salley Gardens" a favourite of her parents.

She was brought up in Stoke-on-Trent and London,. She won a state scholarship to St Paul's Girls' School which caused her father some ideological consternation but her mother was supportive. Whilst at St Paul's however, her father encouraged her to work to ensure that she experienced working life and society very different from that of her more affluent school peers.[4]

Salley went on to read English Literature at Newnham College, Cambridge.[5]

Following university she taught children with special needs. She also taught English literature at Stanford, Oxford and the Open University specialising in Shakespeare, the 19th-century novel and 20th-century poetry.[6] She was also a WEA and further education tutor for adult education classes. During 2012–13 she was a Royal Literary Fund fellow of her alma mater, Newnham College, Cambridge.[7]

After her initial teaching career, she retrained as a Jungian analytical psychotherapist, subsequently working in the NHS. She specialised in helping people who were creatively blocked.[8] She gave up her psychoanalytic work in 2002 because she found "seeing patients" was incompatible with writing novels, although she still lectures on the connections between literature and psychology.[9]

In 2000 her first novel, Miss Garnet's Angel was published and she became a full-time writer. She wrote novels and contributed to newspaper and magazines.

In 2002, she was a judge for the Booker Prize for Fiction.[5]

In 2011 she contributed a short story "Why Willows Weep" to an anthology supporting The Woodland Trust. The anthology - Why Willows Weep - in 2016 had helped The Woodland Trust plant approximately 50,000 trees.

In her 2018 novel The Librarian in her Author's Notes, she describes writing she regards as model or "matchless" by J.B.S. Haldane and Sylvia Townsend Warner.

She has two sons from her marriage with Martin Brown.[10] In 2002, her brief second marriage, to the Irish writer and broadcaster Frank Delaney, ended and was dissolved "just as her career as an author took off".[9] She lives in Notting Hill.[6]

In April 2020 she wrote that she hoped to get the COVID-19 virus, 'in order to be granted the immunity to return to the world and lend a hand'.[1] She said she had a much younger physiological age than her actual age of 70, with low cholesterol and good fitness.

• Vickers, Salley (2000). Miss Garnet’s Angel. OCLC 799184817.[11]
• Vickers, Salley (2001). Instances of the Number 3.[12]
• Vickers, Salley (2003). Mr Golightly’s Holiday. Harper Collins.[13]
• Vickers, Salley (2006). The Other Side of You.[14]
• Vickers, Salley (2007). Where Three Roads Meet. (part of the Canongate Myth Series)[15]
• Vickers, Salley (2009). Dancing Backwards. Fourth Estate.[16]
• Vickers, Salley (November 2010). Aphrodite's Hat, The Collected Stories of Salley Vickers. Fourth Estate.[17]
• Vickers, Salley (1 November 2012). The Cleaner of Chartres. Viking. ISBN 978-0670922123.
• Vickers, Salley (3 November 2016). Cousins. Viking. ISBN 978-0241187715.[18]
• Vickers, Salley (26 April 2018). The Librarian. Viking. ISBN 978-0241321737.[19]

A projected non-fiction book about The Book of Common Prayer and entitled Sweet and Comfortable Words was never published.

• Official website
• Darwin's Angel: An Angelic Response to the God Delusion by John Cornwell. Review by Salley Vickers(subscription required)
• Salley Vickers discusses Belief with Joan Bakewell on BBC Radio 3
• Woman's Hour 9 July 2009 BBC Radio 4