Blue plaque for Angela Carter house

Salman Rushdie has hailed Angela Carter a “treasure” as English Heritage commemorates the author with a blue plaque at her former south London home.

Carter lived at 107 The Chase, Clapham, south London for 16 years until her death from lung cancer aged 51 in 1992. At the address, Carter wrote short story collection The Bloody Chamber, Nights at the Circus, which features a trapeze artist heroine, and her final novel Wise Children, a comedy about 75-year-old twin chorus-girls, under Vintage.

According to English Heritage, Carter often tutored her then student, Nobel Laureate Kazuo Ishiguro, at the kitchen table and entertained fellow writers J.G. Ballard, Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie at the south London house.

Rushdie said: “Angela Carter was incredibly kind and generous to young writers, including me. She was also one of the true originals of English literature, both fabulist and feminist, and her richness of language was and remains a treasure.”

In 2012, Nights at the Circus won the Best James Tait Black Prize, awarded to the best novel to have won the prize since its inception in 1919. The novel triumphed over The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene, A Disaffection by James Kelman, The Road by Cormac McCarthy, Crossing the River by Caryl Phillips and The Mandlebaum Gate by Muriel Spark.