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About Gerda Charles
- Gerda Charles was the pseudonym of Edna Lipson (14 August 1914 – 4 November 1996), an award-winning Anglo-Jewish novelist and author.
- She was born in Liverpool and spent her early years there.
- Her father died when Edna was a year old, throwing the family into poverty.
- At the age of 15, Edna moved to London with her mother.
- Together, they ran a boarding house while she continued her education through evening classes. Lipson published her first novel The True Voice in 1959.
- A Slanting Light, her third novel, won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1963.
- She met further success with the publication of The Destiny Waltz which won the inaugural Whitbread Novel of the Year award in 1971.
- Lipson worked as a journalist and reviewer for various newspapers such as the New Statesman, Daily Telegraph, New York Times and Jewish Chronicle.
- She also edited an anthology of modern Jewish short stories. Edna Lipson never married and lived with her mother until the latter's death in 1981.
- Much of their lives were spent in loneliness and economic hardship.
- Lipson died on 4 November 1996. She is regarded as one of the chroniclers of the Anglo-Jewish experience, alongside writers such as Emanuel Litvinoff, Bernice Rubens, Bernard Kops and Arnold Wesker.
- Her posthumous papers reside in a collection at the University of Reading library.
- The collection consists of miscellaneous literary papers, with periodicals, press cuttings and personal correspondence.
- Tel Aviv University also inaugurated an award called the Gerda Charles Award.
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