Kitty Mrosovsky (1946–1995)

Catherine "Kitty" Mrosovsky was born in Oxford, England, to a family of Russian-European origin. She spent much of her childhood in the Mediterranean region and learned to speak French fluently. She went back to live in England in her teens. She read English at Oxford University, taking a first class honors degree and a BPhil in comparative literature. After spending a year teaching at York University, she decided to devote herself full-time to writing. She taught English part-time at the Open University and produced a highly-acclaimed translation of Gustave Flaubert's The Temptation of Saint Antony (1980). She wrote book reviews and worked as a theatre critic for Quarto. She published her first novel, Hydra, in 1985 to good reviews. She then travelled to Italy, where she wrote a second novel but was unable to find a publisher for it. Returning to England in the late 1980s, she learned that she was HIV positive. She began to investigate developments in AIDS research and became involved in environmental issues and animal welfare. She died at age 48 in 1995.