Michèle Roberts was born in 1949 of a French Catholic mother and an English Protestant father. Much of her work has touched upon the conflicting identities produced by such mixed parentage; her first novel,
A Piece of the Night(1978) is a semi-autobiographical investigation of Anglo-French identity which won the Gay News Literary Award. In an autobiographical piece for the collection
Walking on the Water: Women Talk About Spirituality, edited by Jo Garcia and Sara Maitland (1983), Roberts gives the following account of her early life:
I was born in May 1949, twenty minutes after my twin sister Marguerite. I have an older sister, Jacqueline, and a younger brother, Andrew. My mother is French, and a devout Catholic in the French way: unsentimental, unawed by priestly authority, full
2089 words
Citation: White, Rosemary. "Michèle Roberts". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 06 June 2003 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=5135, accessed 05 October 2024.]