‘Capturing the fun and capriciousness of a woman who never left home without her party shoes in a bag'
In conversation with the sculptor of Princes Street Gardens’ first memorial to a woman
Most of us know something about Dame Muriel Spark. We at least recognise her most famous work - The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, set in her home city of Edinburgh.
Twice nominated for the Booker Prize, awarded a damehood for her services to literature and the recipient of eight honorary doctorates, she was widely acclaimed in her lifetime yet still does not receive the public public recognition her genius might warrant.
She is credited in the London Review of Books as “not only the greatest Scottish novelist of the second half of the twentieth century, but… one of the world’s greatest writers.”
It is only fitting that a memorial to Spark should be placed among those to other literary greats of Edinburgh’s history. In Princes Street Gardens, where Sir Walter Scott, Robert Louis Stevenson, Allan Ramsay and other great thinkers are immortalised in statue, Muriel Spark will be the first woman to have a memorial in the 200-year-old park.
