MURDOCH, Iris

"Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck"

Born in Dublin, Anglo-Irish writer Iris Murdoch read Classical Moderations and Greats at Oxford and in 1942 entered the Treasury as a temporary wartime civil servant. At the end of the war she worked in displaced persons camps in Belgium and Austria  before returning to Oxford as Fellow in Philosophy at St. Anne's College. 

Iris Murdoch was a prodigiously inventive and idiosyncratic author, whose first novel, Under the Net, was published in 1954 to generally excellent reviews, the TLS declaring that it announced the emergence of ''a brilliant talent". In a career that lasted for more than four decades, her fiction received many honors, including the Booker Prize for ''The Sea, the Sea,'' the Whitbread Literary Award for Fiction for ''The Sacred and Profane Love Machine'' and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for ''The Black Prince.'' She was made a Dame of the British Empire in 1987 but she spent much of her career quietly teaching and writing, not interested in lecture tours, prize committees and television appearances.

Along with novels, she produced a half a dozen works on philosophy, several plays, critical writing on literature and modern ideas and poetry.

In 2001 Murdoch was protrayed by Kate WInslett and Judy Dench, in the film, Iris, which chronicled the author's descent into Alzheimer's disease.

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