Ann Quin

Who was Ann Quin?

Ann Quin was a British writer noted for her experimental style. The author of Berg, Three, Passages and Tripticks, she committed suicide in 1973 at the age of 37, the same year as B.S. Johnson. More recently Stewart Home has written in admiration of her work, which remains largely overlooked, although Berg was adapted for film in 1989 as Killing Dad starring Denholm Elliott and Richard E. Grant.

Quin is associated with a loosely-constituted circle of 'experimental' authors in Sixties Britain, headed by B.S. Johnson and including Stefan Themerson, Rayner Heppenstall, Alan Burns and Eva Figes.

Quin came from a working-class family and was educated at a Roman Catholic school, the Convent of the Blessed Sacrament in Brighton, until the age of 17. She trained as a shorthand typist and worked in a solicitor's office, then at a publishing company when she moved to Soho and began writing novels. Her first, Berg, was published by John Calder in 1964.