Susan Hill, author of A Kind Man

Susan Hill’s A Kind Man achieved an immediate impact on its publication in 2011.

Daily Telegraph “… an adroit and poignant parable of selflessness.”

Guardian “Hill impresses without seeking to astonish, and so is one of those rare writers whose work is brilliant in the single, secondary sense” 

Independent “… simple and elegant … it has a power beyond its pages; a haunting resonance between each stark sentence…This is a short book that will live long in the memory.”

Dame Susan Hill (born in Scarborough, England, 5 February 1942) is an author of fiction and non-fiction works. Her novels include The Woman in Black, The Mist in the Mirror and I’m the King of the Castle. Her first novel, The Enclosure, was published in 1961 and since 1979 there has been barely a year when she has not had one or several books published. She won a Somerset Maugham Award for I'm the King of the Castle (1971), the Whitbread Novel Award for The Bird of Night (1972), and the Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Prize for The Albatross (1971), a collection of short stories. 

The Woman in Black (1983), the first of a series of ghost stories by Hill, has been successfully adapted for stage, film and television. She has also written series of Simon Serrailler crime novels, two volumes of memoirs, radio plays, books of non-fiction and children’s stories, and is busy as a reviewer, critic, broadcaster and editor.

Her A Kind Man shows once again Hill’s keen insights into the psychology of family relationships, particularly those families whose protagonists are perhaps remote from and ill at ease with society. While an author’s life does not necessarily find reflection in an artist’s work, it is true that Susan Hill’s own experience of loss finds echoes not only in A Kind Man but in her other works of fiction.