Frances Wilson | Electric Spark: The Enigma of Muriel Spark
Recorded: Wed 22 Apr 2026
Duration: 1 hour
Frances Wilson | Electric Spark: The Enigma of Muriel Spark
Spring 2026
Muriel Spark was – as her greatest creation Miss Jean Brodie would say – the crème de la crème of British post-war novelists. In Electric Spark: The Enigma of Muriel Spark, acclaimed biographer Frances Wilson offers a dazzling new portrait of this most elusive of writers. Drawing on rich archival material, Wilson focuses on Spark’s turbulent early years, a period marked by breakdown and brilliance, faith and deception, poverty and ambition.
Spark’s life, full of weird accidents, strange coincidences and apparently spooky events, reads uncannily like one of her own novels. Divorce, espionage, madness, blackmail, love affairs, revenge and religious conversion were not merely lived experiences but became the substance of her art. Watch our event with Frances Wilson from the Spring 2026 Festival to explore how Spark fashioned treachery, wit and moral daring into fiction of enduring power, and to uncover the making of one of the sharpest, most unsettling imaginations in modern literature. Unmissable. Expertly chaired by broadcaster Alex Clark.
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