Claryon Fitzgibbon (b. 1933) is a Cornish beat poet and novelist, author of – among others – Thorpeness e Pulcinella, Everything You Need to Know About Everything, the Death Becomes… trilogy, M-M-M-Murgatroyd, A Little Coven of Sluts, and the memoir My Life in Plastics. She has been hailed as “our age’s preëminent couturier of rococo wank for bourgeois literati” by London Reads! and “the unholy lovechild of de Sade and Auntie Mame” by The Chicago Literature Quotidian. Counted among her devotees are Yasser Arafat, “Teen Mom” star Kortnee Kurzweiler, Pablo Picasso, Harvey Milk and Marlene Dietrich, the latter of whom is said to have been clutching a copy of Fitzgibbon’s Cassiopeia on her deathbed.

An alumna of the prestigious Manalot Academy for Girls, Ms. Fitzgibbon was recognized early for her talents when she was awarded the Jordi and Transcenda Manalot Prize for Achievement in Literature at the age of 9. Since then she has gone on to win nearly every major prize in literature, including the Melf in 1957 for what is likely the most well-known title in her oeuvre – thanks to the Hollywood film of the same name starring Rita Hayworth and Dmitri Avrikoff – 30 Years On I Come A-Knockin’.

The authoress was also profoundly influenced by her time at Sixteen Ambassadors Preparatory School; the institution appears in many of her works, most notably as the alma mater of villainess Ritalette in the Sweet Hunger series of the 1970s. She has remained an active supporter of Ambassadors, and in 1997 established a legacy fund for the building of the school’s Fitzgibbon Pavilion for Literacy.

Claryon Fitzgibbon is a Dame of the Empire and a pebble collector, and has been told she cuts a fierce figure in a ballgown, even at her age. She lives in Leeds with her long-time lover Lord Francis Ancella, and their son Frank “Cups” Ancella, of Thorny Blackness fame.