Simon Mawer

Simon Mawer (1948-2025) taught biology before beginning a long career as a novelist. He earned a degree in zoology at Oxford and later taught in Rome. His debut novel, Chimera, won the McKitterick Prize, while The Fall took the 2003 Boardman Tasker Prize for Mountain Literature. The Glass Room was Mawer’s eighth novel and reached the 2009 Booker Prize shortlist. Using a modernist house as its central presence, the book follows the building and its inhabitants through sixty years of twentieth-century upheaval. Mawer’s later fiction included The Girl Who Fell from the Sky, Tightrope, Prague Spring and Ancestry.