Paddy Kitchen

Patricia Margaret Kitchen (23 May 1934 – 23 November 2005) was an English novelist, biographer and art critic.[1]

Born in Battersea to middle-class parents, she grew up in Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire. After rejecting an offer from Cambridge University she moved to London in 1954, working in a Mayfair advertising agency while moonlighting as a hat-check girl in the night club Le Club Contemporain. While working at the Royal College of Art she met the painter Frank Bowling when he was still a student there. They married in 1960 and had one son.[1] Kitchen was one of the women interviewed by Nell Dunn in Talking to Women (1965).[2]

After divorcing Bowling in the late 1960s, Kitchen went on to live with, and later marry, the writer Dulan Barber. Continuing to write novels, she also began writing non-fiction with biographies of Patrick Geddes and Gerard Manley Hopkins. In later life she bought a house in Barnwell, Northamptonshire, which became the subject of her book of the same name. She died on 23 November 2005.[1][3]

The novelist Bessie Head was a close friend. The pair corresponded from 1969 until Head's death in 1986[4][5] on a range of subjects, including Head's novel A Question of Power.[6]