Angela Carter

The ten stories in The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories, published in 1979, take Bluebeard, Beauty and the Beast, Puss in Boots and Little Red Riding Hood apart and rebuild them from the inside, giving the women in them appetite, calculation and teeth. Angela Carter, born Angela Olive Stalker in Eastbourne in 1940, trained as a newspaper reporter on the Croydon Advertiser before reading English at Bristol University. The collection took the Cheltenham Festival Literary Prize, and Neil Jordan drew on its wolf stories for the 1984 film The Company of Wolves, which Carter helped write. Her Somerset Maugham Award money paid for two years in Tokyo from 1969, a stay she said taught her what being a woman meant. Her nine novels include The Magic Toyshop, The Passion of New Eve, Nights at the Circus, which won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and Wise Children. She died of lung cancer in London on 16 February 1992, aged 51.