Electric Spark : The Enigma of Muriel Spark - Shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize 2025

From one of our leading biographers and critics comes an exhilarating, landmark new look at Muriel Spark.

Muriel Spark was a puzzle, and so too were her books. She dealt in word games, tricks and ciphers; her life was composed of weird accidents, strange coincidences and spooky events. In Electric Spark , Frances Wilson aims to finally crack her code.

We return to Spark’s early years when everything was piled on: divorce, madness, murder, espionage, poverty, skulduggery, blackmail, love affairs, revenge and a major religious conversion. If this sounds like a novel by Muriel Spark it is because her experiences of the 1940s and 1950s became, alchemically reduced, the material of her art.

Author: Frances Wilson

Scotland, Biography: literary, Literary studies: from c 1900 -

Published on 9 Apr 2026 by Bloomsbury Publishing PLC.