Sylvia Townsend Warner

Sylvia Townsend Warner was a British novelist, short story writer, and poet whose witty, unconventional fiction has experienced a significant revival in recent years. Born in Harrow in 1893, she was a musicologist, a communist, and lived in a long partnership with the poet Valentine Ackland. The Corner That Held Them is set in a medieval Norfolk convent from 1349 to 1382, following the nuns and their community through plague, politics, and the small dramas of enclosed life. The novel has no conventional plot or protagonist — it is a quiet, revolutionary experiment in collective storytelling that has been championed by writers including Ali Smith and Claire-Louise Bennett. Warner died in 1978. Her audiobooks and books offer listeners and readers beautifully unconventional fiction from a writer whose quiet brilliance is finally being recognised.