Profile of Winifred Holtby on Famous Like Me

Winifred Holtby (June 23, 1898 - September 29, 1935) was an English novelist and journalist.

Born to a prosperous Yorkshire family, Holtby was educated at home by a governess and then at boarding school. Although she passed the entrance exam for Somerville College, Oxford, the First World War changed her plans. In early 1918, she joined the Women's Auxiliary Army Corps (WAAC), but soon after she arrived in France, the war came to an end.

In 1919, she returned to Somerville and met Vera Brittain, with whom she was to maintain a lifelong friendship. Holtby and Brittain graduated together, and in 1921 they moved to London, hoping to establish themselves as writers. Holtby's early novels - Anderby Wold (1923), The Crowded Street (1924) and The Land of Green Ginger (1927) - met with moderate success.

Holtby was also a prolific journalist and, over the next decade and a half, she wrote for more than 20 newspapers and magazines, including the feminist journal Time and Tide and the Manchester Guardian newspaper. She wrote a regular weekly column for the trade union magazine The Schoolmistress. Her books during this period included a critical study of Virginia Woolf and a volume of short stories, Truth is Not Sober.

Like Brittain, Holtby was an ardent pacifist and lectured extensively for the League of Nations Union. Holtby gradually became more critical of the British class system and by the late 1920s she was active in the Independent Labour Party.

In 1931, Holtby began to suffer from high blood pressure, recurrent headaches and bouts of lassitude. Eventually she was diagnosed as suffering from sclerosis of the kidneys. Her doctor gave her only two years to live. Aware of her impending death, Holtby put all her remaining energy into what became her most important book, South Riding. Winifred Holtby died on 29th September, 1935. South Riding was published the following year and received high praise from the critics. The book won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for 1937.

Vera Brittain subsequently wrote about her friendship with Holtby in her book Testament of Friendship (1940).

Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize

In 1967, the Royal Society of Literature instituted the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize for the best regional novel of the year. It was replaced in 2003 by the Ondaatje Prize.

• List of Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize award winners

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