Alice Thomas Ellis

Alice Thomas Ellis was an English writer and essayist born in Liverpool. She wrote numerous novels and some non-fiction, including cookery books. Ellis was born in Liverpool to John and Alexandra Lindholm. John was half Finnish, and Alexandra half Welsh. She spent part of her childhood as a World War II evacuee in North Wales, a period she wrote about in A Welsh Childhood. Thomas Ellis was educated at Bangor Grammar School and then entered the Liverpool School of Art. A member of the Church of Humanity, Ellis converted to Catholicism at age 19. She then dropped out of art school and spent six months in a convent. However, after she suffered a slipped disc, the religious order expelled her as unable to do physical labour. In the 1950s she moved to Chelsea in London, where she embraced a Bohemian lifestyle and became known for wearing black. She was working in a coffee shop when she met Colin Haycraft. The couple married in 1956 and eventually had seven children. In 1968, Haycraft and a partner bought Gerald Duckworth and Company, a publishing house in London. Ellis became its fiction editor.