British · 1931–1996
Caroline Blackwood's "Great Granny Webster" earned a 1977 Booker Prize shortlisting for its portrait of Anglo-Irish aristocratic decline. The British-born author—granddaughter of the Earl of Antrim, briefly married to Lucian Freud and then Robert Lowell—wrote about damaged families with the insider's authority. Her fiction and nonfiction shared a cold eye for dysfunction, whether in crumbling great houses or collapsing marriages. Blackwood wrote beautifully about ugly things.