Georgina Hammick Biography

British short-story writer, born in Hampshire, educated in Kenya and England; she later attended the Academie Julian, Paris, and the Salisbury School of Art. Her first collection of stories, People for Lunch (1987), was acclaimed for its wit, irony, and compassion. The stories in Spoilt (1992), her second collection, return to the affectionately depicted parochial and suburban landscapes of the earlier work, and are characterized by Hammick's customary elegance of style; here, however, her skill with satirical dialogue and her narrative dexterity often conceal tragic depths, as in the superb ‘The Dying Room’. Widely anthologized herself, Hammick has also edited an anthology, The Virago Book of Love and Loss (1992), which includes a number of influences and affinities—Elizabeth Bowen, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Elizabeth Taylor, Alice Munro.