Maeve Binchy

Maeve Binchy taught French, Latin and history in Dublin girls' schools before The Irish Times took her on, where she became Women's Page editor and later London editor. Out of the London years came Central Line in 1978 and Victoria Line in 1980, two sets of short stories each keyed to a stop on the Underground; the pair were gathered as London Transports in 1983. Light a Penny Candle, her first novel, had appeared the year before that collection and made her name in her early forties. Echoes, Circle of Friends, Tara Road and Minding Frankie followed, and film and television took several of them up. She married the writer Gordon Snell in 1977 and settled with him in Dalkey, south of Dublin. Her last novel, A Week in Winter, turns on the opening of a guest house in Stoneybridge, an invented village on the west coast. She finished it only weeks before her death on 30 July 2012, and it reached print later that year.