author
Norma Lorimer
1864–1948
Best known for stories shaped by the Isle of Man and for vivid travel writing, this Scottish author wrote with a strong sense of place and curiosity about the wider world. Her fiction helped secure her reputation as an important early voice in Manx literature.
1 Audiobook
There was a King in Egypt
by Norma Lorimer
About the author
Born in Auchterarder, Perthshire, in 1864, Norma Octavia Lorimer was raised in the south of the Isle of Man and educated at Castletown High School. That Manx upbringing stayed central to her imagination, and later readers and literary historians have remembered her as one of the notable early women novelists connected with the island.
Lorimer published fiction from the 1890s onward, including A Sweet Disorder, Josiah's Wife, and Mirry-Ann. She also wrote travel books such as By the Waters of Sicily, bringing together a novelist's eye for character with a travel writer's feel for atmosphere and setting.
She died in 1948. Today, she is especially valued for the way her novels preserve Manx life and feeling, while her travel writing shows the wider range of places and cultures that interested her.