Gillian Bradshaw - Biography

Biography

Gillian Bradshaw was born in Falls Church, Virginia, and spent part of her youth in Santiago, Chile. She attended the University of Michigan, where she won the Phillips Prize for Classical Greek in 1975 and 1977, as well as the Hopwood Prize for fiction for her first novel, Hawk of May. She went on to advanced study at Newnham College, Cambridge, where she studied Classical philology. Hawk of May was published while she was preparing for University of Cambridge exams.

Bradshaw decided to stay in Cambridge for another year to write another novel and think about what to do for a career. However, while there, she discovered she could live on her income as a novelist, and she has been writing novels ever since. She also met her husband, who was completing his doctorate in physics. Bradshaw and her husband, British Mathematical physics professor Robin Ball, have four children. She says of herself, "I am an enthusiast for classical antiquity, and love roaming about Graeco-Roman ruins on holiday. The rest of the family has a huge exposure to hypocausts and hippodromes. They have sometimes protested ('Not another Roman ruin!') but mostly they've quite enjoyed it."

Bradshaw's physicist husband provided one aspect of her portrayal of Archimedes in her novel The Sand-Reckoner. But as she states in the afterword, her portrayal is based on the ancient sources on Archimedes and not on any living person such as the theoretical physicists she knows. Bradshaw has been a judge in the Institute of Physics Paperclip Physics competition, and her contemporary and historical novels with a scientific background show a deep interest in human responses to scientific discoveries.