Lucy Ellmann was born in Illinois in 1958. When she was 13, she moved to England with her parents, the literary critics Richard and Mary Ellmann, and though she always meant to return to the US, she has remained in the UK ever since. She is the author of seven novels, including the Guardian Fiction Prize-winning Sweet Desserts. She lives in Scotland with her husband, the writer Todd McEwen.
On 13 November, her latest novel, Ducks, Newburyport, a 1,000-page epic written almost entirely in one sprawling sentence, was announced as winner of the 2019 Goldsmiths Prize. Its anonymous narrator is a woman from Newcomerstown, Ohio, who is raising her four children while running a bakery from the family kitchen. Her thoughts rapidly unspool before us, each one preceded by the phrase “the fact that”, obeying no logic other than the instinctive associations that dictate all our internal monologues, interrupted and re-routed by daily life. Accepting the £10,000 prize, Ellmann said: “It’s a lot of money for one sentence!”
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