Lee, Carol Ann 1969–

Personal

Born 1969, in Yorkshire, England; children: River (son). Education: Manchester Polytechnic, earned degree (history of art, design).

Addresses

Home—Yorkshire, England.

Career

Author. Also worked for Manchester Jewish Museum and Anne Frank Trust.

Writings

NONFICTION

Roses from the Earth: The Biography of Anne Frank, foreword by Buddy Elias, Viking (London, England), 1999.

Anne Frank's Story: Her Life Retold for Children, Troll (Mahwah, NJ), 2002.

The Hidden Life of Otto Frank, Morrow (New York, NY), 2003.

(With Jacqueline van Maarsen) A Friend Called Anne: One Girl's Story of War, Peace, and a Unique Friendship with Anne Frank, Viking (New York, NY), 2005.

Anne Frank and Children of the Holocaust, foreword by Buddy Elias, Viking (New York, NY), 2006.

Contributor to periodicals.

Author's work has been translated into fifteen languages.

FICTION

The Winter of the World, HarperCollins (New York, NY), 2007.

Sidelights

British author Carol Ann Lee has published a number of critically acclaimed books focusing on Annelies Marie Frank, a Holocaust victim who died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp at age fifteen and whose writings have been read around the world as The Diary of Anne Frank. Among Lee's best-known works are Roses from the Earth: The Biography of Anne Frank and The Hidden Life of Otto Frank, a biography of Anne's father.

Lee developed a lifelong interest in Frank at the age of six, after reading an abridged version of her famous diary. The death of Lee's own father six years later increased the girl's appreciation of the work. "I started to see its deeper meaning and I became interested in Anne's ideals and how she managed to sustain her faith in mankind," the author related to Emma Brockes in the London Guardian. "I remember getting really upset on my sixteenth birthday because Anne's last birthday was fifteen and I had got past it. I read the diary over and over again and at every age it meant something different to me." By age seventeen, Lee had amassed a vast archive of Frank memorabilia, including newspaper clippings, photographs, and foreign editions of the diary. She also began writing a biography of Frank, although publishers showed little interest in the work. After graduating from Manchester Polytechnic with a degree in the history of art and design, Lee rekindled her interest in the manuscript. Her nonfiction debut, Roses from the Earth, appeared in 1999, the seventieth anniversary of Frank's birth.

Roses from the Earth, which includes a foreword by Buddy Elias, Frank's first cousin, is "a work of real sympathy and imagination," according to London Mail on Sunday contributor Julie Myerson. Lee's biography discusses Frank's childhood before her family went into hiding in Amsterdam and also describes the girl's tragic final months at a Dutch deportation camp and, later, at Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. "I wanted to set the diary in its context in a way that she [Frank] couldn't,"

Lee explained to Brocke. "It was like writing two books that would eventually come together: the rise of the Nazis and the story of this really ordinary family just trying to get along and enjoy themselves." Anne Karpf, writing in the London Guardian, described the biography as "copiously footnoted and thoroughly researched" and noted that Lee "doesn't shirk the horrors of the camps." The book's "final chapters which gather, from hearsay and fact, as much as we can possibly know of Anne's last days, make traumatic reading, containing as they do precise details of the mechanism of the camps," Myerson similarly noted.

In The Hidden Life of Otto Frank Lee profiles the only member of the Frank family to survive the horrors of the concentration camps. A World War I veteran and businessman, Otto Frank became the proprietor of his daughter's literary and financial legacy after World War II ended. The author also names Tony Ahlers, a Dutch Nazi, as the man who betrayed the Frank family. "Lee's portrayal of Frank's life's work preaching common humanity is well worth reading," remarked Julia Neuberger in the London Times.

In addition to her adult biographies, Lee has also published a number of works for young readers. Anne Frank's Story: Her Life Retold for Children, a reworking of Roses from the Earth, was praised for its "clear, engaging style" by School Library Journal contributor Martha Link. In A Friend Called Anne: One Girl's Story of War, Peace, and a Unique Friendship with Anne Frank, Lee looks at Anne's life through the eyes of childhood friend Jacqueline van Maarsen. "This absorbing book vividly portrays life in occupied Amsterdam and throws interesting sidelights on Anne Frank's story," noted Booklist critic Carolyn Phelan. Drawing on articles, interviews, and personal diaries, Lee examines the plight of young Holocaust victims and survivors in Anne Frank and Children of the Holocaust. The author "succeeds at illuminating the lives" of these individuals, observed Janet S. Thompson in a review of the work for School Library Journal.

Biographical and Critical Sources

PERIODICALS

Booklist, February 15, 2003, Brendan Driscoll, review of The Hidden Life of Otto Frank, p. 1036; April 1, 2005, Carolyn Phelan, review of A Friend Called Anne: One Girl's Story of War, Peace, and a Unique Friendship with Anne Frank, p. 1360; October 1, 2006, Hazel Rochman, review of Anne Frank and the Children of the Holocaust, p. 47.

Daily Telegraph (London, England), July 13, 2002, Linda Grant, review of The Hidden Life of Otto Frank.

Guardian (London, England), March 22, 1999, Emma Brockes, "After Anne," review of Roses from the Earth: The Biography of Anne Frank; April 3, 1999, Anne Karpf, review of Roses from the Earth; p. 10; July 13, 2002, Natasha Walter, review of The Hidden Life of Otto Frank.

Independent (London, England), July 11, 2002, Julia Pascal, review of The Hidden Life of Otto Frank, p. 14.

Kirkus Reviews, April 1, 2005, review of A Friend Called Anne, p. 427; September 15, 2006, review of Anne Frank and the Children of the Holocaust, p. 956; September 15, 2007, review of The Winter of the World.

Library Journal, February 15, 2003, Frederic Krome, review of The Hidden Life of Otto Frank, p. 151.

Mail on Sunday (London, England), March 21, 1999, Julie Myerson, review of Roses from the Earth, p. 20.

New Statesman, April 2, 1999, Martyn Bedford, review of Roses from the Earth, p. 47; August 5, 2002, Jennie Bristow, review of The Hidden Life of Otto Frank, p. 38.

Observer (London, England), July 14, 2002, Rachel Cooke, review of The Hidden Life of Otto Frank.

Publishers Weekly, May 23, 2005, review of A Friend Called Anne, p. 80; August 27, 2007, review of The Winter of the World, p. 61.

School Library Journal, November, 2002, Martha Link, review of Anne Frank's Story: Her Life Retold for Children, p. 189; April, 2005, Rita Soltan, review of AFriend Called Anne, p. 158; December, 2006, Janet S. Thompson, review of Anne Frank and the Children of the Holocaust, p. 165.

Scotland on Sunday, July 14, 2002, Carol Ann Lee, "The Darkest Chapter," p. 9.

Times Literary Supplement, June 4, 1999, Adam Hochschild, review of Roses from the Earth, p. 10.

Times (London, England), July 10, 2002, Julia Neuberger, review of The Hidden Life of Otto Frank, p. 20.