Robert Edric, pseudonym of Gary Edric Armitage Biography

British novelist, born in Sheffield, educated at Hull University; he became a full-time writer in 1982. His novels A Season of Peace (1985) and Across the Autumn Grass (1986) were published under his original name. Winter Garden (1985), the first of his novels as Edric, won the James Tait Black Award, and displayed his masterful handling of the complex and sinisterly comic narratives often characteristic of his work. In the Days of the American Museum (1990) forms an extravagantly imaginative treatment of P. T. Barnum's celebrated exhibition of curiosities. The Broken Lands (1992) is a harrowingly bleak account of Sir John Franklin's search for the North West Passage. A small town in southern Germany in 1945 is the setting for the narrative of guilt and concealment in Hallowed Ground (1993). The Earth Made Glass (1994) deals compellingly with the arrival of an inquisitor in a remote village in seventeenth-century England. Edric's other novels include A New Ice Age (1986), A Lunar Eclipse (1989) and Elysium (1995).