Magdalen Nabb

Magdalen Nabb was born in Church, a moorland village in Lancashire, England. She studied art and, later, pottery which she taught in an English art school whilst exhibiting her own work until 1975 when she moved to Florence in Italy. There, she continued to work on pottery in a majolica studio in Montelupo Fiorentino, a pottery town near Florence, and began writing. It was in Montelupo that she met the model for Marshal Guarnaccia. The town itself, with its tumbledown factories and its wonderful restaurant, are featured in The Marshal and the Murderer. She still lived and wrirote in Florence, near enough to the carabinieri station in the Pitti Palace to stroll there regularly and have a chat with the marshal who keeped her up to date on crime in the city. She wrote for adults and for children and doid occasional journalistic pieces for English, German and Italian papers. Her books for both adults and children have been translated into many languages, including French, German, Japanese, Flemish, Danish, Dutch, Hebrew, Portuguese, Spanish, Croatian... Having been a fan of Georges Simenon’s novels for as long as she could remember, she was astonished and overjoyed when Simenon wrote to congratulate her on her first novel. Their correspondence continued until his death and, until then, the first copy of each book went to him. His presence is very much missed but in difficult moments she could still get advice from him by browsing through his books and his letters. Magdalen Nabb passed away on 18.08.2007