Brenda Maddox
Brenda Maddox, Lady Maddox FRSL was an American author, journalist, and biographer, who lived in the UK since 1959.Biography
Born in Bridgewater, Massachusetts in 1932. She graduated from Harvard University with a degree in English literature. She also studied at the London School of Economics. She was a book reviewer for The Observer, The Times, New Statesman, The New York Times, and The Washington Post, and regularly contributed to BBC Radio 4 as a critic and commentator. Her biographies of Elizabeth Taylor, D.H. Lawrence, Nora Joyce, W. B. Yeats and Rosalind Franklin have been widely acclaimed. She received the Los Angeles Times Biography Award, the Silver PEN Award, the French Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger, and the Whitbread Biography Prize.
Maddox was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1999.
Maddox lived in London and spent time at her cottage near Brecon, Wales where she and her husband, Sir John Maddox, were actively involved within the local community. She was vice-president of the Hay-on-Wye Festival of Literature, a member of the Editorial Board of British Journalism Review, and a past chairman of the Broadcasting Press Guild. Maddox had two children and two stepchildren.
Her best-known biography, that of James Joyce's wife Nora Barnacle, was made into a 2000 movie, Nora, starring Susan Lynch in the title role and Ewan McGregor as Joyce.
Her biography of the scientist James Watson was published in 2016.
She died on 16 June 2019, aged 87.
