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Muriel Spark, DBE ( February 1 , 1918 – April 13 , 2006 ) was a leading British Novelist . She was born Muriel Sarah Camberg in Edinburgh , Scotland to a Jewish father and an Anglican mother, and was educated at James Gillespie's High School For Girls . In 1938, she married Sidney Oswald Spark, followed him to Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe ) and had a son with him but their marriage was a disaster. Thus she returned to Great Britain in 1944 and worked in intelligence during World War II . She began writing seriously after the war, under her married name, beginning with and Evelyn Waugh supported her. Her first novel ''The Comforters'' was published in as "a book of extraordinary originality") featured a character who knew she was in a novel; and in ''The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie'' she told her characters' stories from the past and the future simultaneously. Kermode refers to the recurrent theme in her novels of "the central question, why evil exists in a world made by a good God".
She received the US Ingersoll Foundation TS Eliot Award in 1992 and the British Literature Prize in 1997. She became Dame Commander Of The Order Of The British Empire in 1993 , in recognition of her services to literature. RELATIONSHIP WITH HER SON It was reported in the '' Daily Mail '' on April 22 2006 that her only son Robin, 68, had not attended her funeral service in Tuscany. Spark left him in Rhodesia at the age of 6 while she moved to England and while she maintained it was her intention for them to set up home in England he actually returned to Britain with his father 18 months later to be brought up by his maternal grandparents in Scotland . Thus began a hostile relationship with his mother. She provided money at regular intervals to support her son as he toiled unsuccessfully over the years. His father was Sydney Spark and Muriel whom Spark had followed to Rhodesia days after their marriage on 3 September 1937 . However within months she realied he was a manic depressive prone to violent outbursts. Robin was born in July 1938 but by 1940 Muriel had left Sydney and in 1944 she returned to Britain . Over the years her son is reported to have written, desperate for attention which Spark was unwilling to provide, finding his childish sentiment cloying. The two really fell out in later years when Robin's Judaism prompted him to petition for his late grandmother to be recognised as Jewish. The devout Catholic Spark reacted furiously and branded her struggling artist son a failure. During one of her last book signings in Edinburgh she responded to an enquiry from a journalist asking if she would see her son by saying 'I think I know how best to avoid him by now'. BIBLIOGRAPHY
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