Elaine Feinstein (1930 - 2019) was born in Liverpool, brought up in Leicester, and educated at Newnham College, Cambridge. She wrote fourteen novels, many radio plays and television dramas, and five biographies.
In 1980 she was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. In 1990, she received a Cholmondeley Award for Poetry, and was given an Honorary D.Litt from the University of Leicester. She was a Rockefeller Foundation Fellow at Bellagio in 1998.
Feinstein's novels and biographies have been translated into many languages, and her poems have been widely anthologised. Her Collected Poems and Translations (2002) was a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation. Her memoir, It Goes With The Territory: Memoirs of a Poet, was published in 2013, and her final volume of poetry, The Clinic, Memory: New and Selected Poems was released in 2017.
