Early years and career Annalena McAfee was born in 1952 in
London, England, to parents from
Glasgow, Scotland. She was educated at
Essex University. In 2003, she served as a judge for the
Orange Prize for Fiction, the UK's largest annual literary award. She has also been on the panel for
The South Bank Show arts awards, the Ben Pimlott Prize for political writing (2005),
The Guardian/
Penguin photography competition for cover art (2006), the Samuel Johnson prize for non-fiction, and other
awards. Literary festivals where she has spoken include
Prague (2003) and
Hay-on-Wye (2005). In 2008, she served as a judge for the
Orwell Prize (for political writing). McAfee was the editor of
The Guardians review supplement, the
Guardian Review, from 1999 until July 2006, when she resigned to pursue a writing career. Before working for
The Guardian, she was a literary journalist at the
Financial Times and theatre critic on the
Evening Standard. and
Michiko Kakutani, reviewing it in
The New York Times, wrote that "McAfee manages to fuse satire and observation together in a potent brew." McAfee's "richly textured, playful second novel for adults" was entitled
Hame (2017), summed up by literary critic
Stuart Kelly as "a curious confection indeed. ... a sweet and quaint novel, full of just-in-time revelations and obvious fondness", and described by reviewer Will Gore as "a novel about identity; both with specific regard to Scottish character and nationalism and to broader questions of how we attach ourselves to people over place, or vice versa, and of how we construct our personal life stories." About McAfee's next novel,
Nightshade, published in 2020.
Joanna Briscoe concluded: "The ending is simultaneously overdramatic and yet vastly satisfying. Patience is rewarded, and
Nightshades questions continue to intrigue." McAfee also edited the anthology
Lives and Works (2002), a collection of literary profiles from
The Guardian. ==Personal life==