Frances Wilson "Electric Spark: The Enigma of Muriel Spark"

Biographers in Conversation · Jan 28, 2026 · 55m

In this episode of Biographers in Conversation, Frances Wilson chats with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about Electric Spark: The Enigma of Muriel Spark.

Here’s what you’ll discover in this episode:

How Muriel Spark’s first 39 turbulent years provided the raw material for her fiction.

Frances Wilson’s discovery of Spark’s games, puzzles and anagrams, including the invented ‘doppelganger’, Nita McEwen, whose name conceals the chilling phrase, Twin Menace.

Wilson structured Electric Spark around Spark’s ‘four Marys’ and the Scottish ballad tradition, tracing how Mary Queen of Scots, Mary Shelley…