In addition to the Booker Prize, she has won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for The Black Prince and the Whitbread Literary Award for Fiction for The Sacred and Profane Love Machine, and is an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Though best known as a novelist, she has also published literary criticism, including the influential essay, “Against Dryness” (1961) a volume of poetry, A Year of Birds (1978) three dramatic adaptations (two of which were collaborations) of her novels, as well as two original plays and an additional three books of philosophy: The Sovereignty of the Good (1970), The Fire and the Sun: Why Plato Banished the Artists (1977) and Acastos: Two Platonic Dialogues (1986).

She moved from Steeple Aston to Oxford in 1986. Anne’s College, and for the next four years was a part-time lecturer at the Royal College of Art in London. In 1963 she was named Honorary Fellow of St. Murdoch married John Bayley, an Oxford don, in 1956, and for many years lived in Steeple Aston, a village near Oxfordshire. Since then she has published twenty-four formal, traditional novels, including The Sandcastle (1957), The Bell (1958), A Severed Head (1961), A Fairly Honourable Defeat (1970), A Word Child (1975), The Sea, The Sea (1978), which won the Booker Prize for that year, The Philosopher’s Pupil (1983), The Good Apprentice (1985), The Book and the Brotherhood (1987), and The Message to the Planet (1989). She published her first book, Sartre: Romantic Rationalist, in 1953 and her first novel, Under the Net, the next year. Anne’s College, Oxford, and a university lecturer in philosophy the following year. She held a Sarah Smithson Studentship in philosophy at Newnham College, Cambridge in 1947–1948, and became a fellow of St. She was assistant principal in the treasury from 1942 to 1944 and an administrative officer with the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration in England, Belgium, and Austria during the years 1944 to 1946.

She was educated at Badminton School in Bristol and studied classics at Somerville College, Oxford from 1938 until 1942, receiving first-class honors. Iris Murdoch was born in Dublin on Jand grew up in London. Interviewed by Jeffrey Meyers Issue 115, Summer 1990

The Bell by Iris Murdoch