- Penelope Farmer at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
- Penelope Farmer at Library of Congress, with 32 library catalogue records
Penelope Jane Farmer (born 1939) is an English fiction writer well known for children's fantasy novels. Her best-known novel is Charlotte Sometimes (1969), a boarding-school story that features a multiple time slip.
Farmer was born a fraternal twin in Westerham, Kent, on 14 June 1939, as the third child of Hugh Robert MacDonald (died 26 May 2004) and Penelope Boothby Farmer.[1] Her parents and hospital staff were unaware of her existence until some 25 minutes after the birth of her twin sister Judith.[2] Throughout Farmer's life, twinship has been a defining element in her understanding of her identity. The importance of Farmer's relationship with her twin sister Judith was reflected in her books, having published Two, or: The Book of Twins and Doubles in 1996, and Sisters: An Anthology in 1999. The twins have an older brother, Tim, and a younger sister, Sally.[3]
After attending a boarding school, she read history at St Anne's College, Oxford and did postgraduate work at Bedford College, University of London.[4]
She visited South Africa in 1994, talking with people about their views on the election. She later wrote an article about this, published in the Index on Censorship.[5]
In 2000, Farmer published an article about the challenges facing the Hong Kong Chinese community in the UK.[6]
According to Penelope Farmer's personal blog site, she was in 2012 living on Lanzarote in the Canary Islands. She there described herself as "a writer – published for many years, now struggling", and listed "her grandchildren" among those she loved and missed. Other relations were mentioned: the departure of her daughter and a granddaughter (23 April 2004). The 22 April 2010 entry states that her son was among those staying with her, with his daughters aged eight and twelve.[7][better source needed]
Farmer's first publication was The China People, a collection of literary fairy tales for young people, in 1960.[1] One story written for this collection was judged too long to include. This was re-written as the first chapter of her first novel for children, The Summer Birds. In 1963, this received a Carnegie Medal commendation and was cited as an American Library Association Notable Book.[3] The Summer Birds was soon followed by its sequels, Emma in Winter (1966) and Charlotte Sometimes (1969), and by A Castle of Bone (1972), Year King (1977), Thicker than Water (1989), Penelope: A Novel (1993), and Granny and Me (1998).
Farmer stated that she, while writing Emma in Winter, did not realize that identity was such a predominant theme in the novel until she encountered Margery Fisher's comments on the book. She had a similar realization, this time on her own, while writing Charlotte Sometimes.[8]
