Rachel Ingalls

Rachel Ingalls was born in Boston in 1940. She dropped out of school and spent time in Germany before studying at Radcliffe College and then moving to Britain in 1965, where she lived for the rest of her life. Over half a century Ingalls wrote eleven celebrated story collections and novellas, all published by Faber. Her debut novel, Theft (1970), won the Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award and her 1982 novella, Mrs Caliban, was named by the British Book Marketing Council as one of the greatest American novels since World War II – to her surprise. A cult classic, it has been described as 'genius; a broadcast from a stranger and more dazzling dimension' (Patricia Lockwood); 'a feminist masterpiece' (Carmen Maria Machado); 'its own terrible, brilliant reality' (Sarah Hall); 'immensely skillful' (Ursula K. Le Guin); and still 'outpac[ing], out-weird[ing], and out-romanc[ing] anything today' (Marlon James). Ingalls died in 2019 in London.