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Jennifer Dawson (1929 - 2000) was born and brought up in Kennington and Camberwell with her three sisters and one brother in a family of Fabian socialists; her mother was a journalist and her father worked for the Workers' Travel Association. She read History at St Anne's College, Oxford, where she suffered a breakdown and spent several months in the local hospital. After graduating in 1954, Dawson worked variously as a teacher in a convent in France; a dictionary subeditor and indexer for the Clarendon Press and Oxford University Press; a welfare worker in London's East End; and a social worker in a psychiatric hospital. Her experience both as a mental health professional and as a patient formed the basis for her acclaimed 1961 debut novel The Ha-Ha, which won that year's James Tait Black Memorial Prize as well as being adapted for the stage and broadcast by the BBC on radio and television. In 1959 she was awarded the Dawes Hicks Scholarship for Philosophy to study at University College London. Dawson was committed to the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament from its inception and met her husband, Michael Hinton - an Oxford philosophy don - during the 1963 Aldermaston march. They lived for many years in Charlbury in Oxfordshire, where she remained active in the peace movement. Over her lifetime Dawson wrote six more novels, a collection of short stories, and co-authored a children's adventure story. She died in 2000. |
