Ann Quin (Ann Marie Quin) Biography

British novelist, born in Brighton. She won acclaim with her first novel, Berg (1964), a psychological drama set in an out-of-season seaside town where a man plots the murder of his father. Three (1966) is an exploration of a triangular relationship between a married couple, Ruth and Leonard, and ‘S’, a young girl whose death by drowning prefigures the author's own. Passages (1969), as experimental in tone as the earlier works, deals with the nature of identity and the relationship between reality and fantasy in its account of a woman's search for her lost brother. Tripticks (1972) follows its narrator/hero across America, in pursuit of his ex-wife. The work is a collage of styles and perspectives, incorporating cinematic techniques (Quin acknowledged the influence of the ‘nouvelle vague’ cinema on her writing) and images reminiscent of Pop Art.