British · b. 1959
Susanna Clarke's "Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell" (2004) reinvented fantasy fiction—a 1,000-page novel about two magicians in Napoleonic England, written in nineteenth-century style with footnotes. Clarke spent ten years writing it. "Piranesi" (2020), a slim novel about a man alone in an infinite house, won the Women's Prize for Fiction. Her work proves fantasy can be literary without sacrificing wonder.