Hazel Holt is known as a writer in two veins: as the biographer and literary executor of her friend Barbara Pym; and as a crime novelist of the traditional English type. Holt was born in 1928 in Birmingham, England, educated at King Edward VI High School for Girls in the city, and later at Newnham College, Cambridge. She worked at the International African Institute in London, where she met Pym.

Pym, now seen as a pre-eminent comic novelist, had fallen out of print until 1978; when Pym died two years later Holt worked tirelessly to keep her fiction alive. She completed the unfinished novel An Academic Question, which was published in 1986, wrote the biography of Pym, A Lot to Ask (1990), and supplied introductions to both An Academic Question and a further posthumously published novel An

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Citation: Turner, Nick. "Hazel Holt". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 15 October 2020 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=14664, accessed 25 April 2024.]