THE ARCHIVES of a former Queen Mary College student have been acquired by the British Library. Experimental novelist Eva Figes came to Britain as a seven-year-old child as her family fled the horrors of Nazi Germany. She studied English at Mile End bas

THE ARCHIVES of a former Queen Mary College student have been acquired by the British Library.

Experimental novelist Eva Figes came to Britain as a seven-year-old child as her family fled the horrors of Nazi Germany.

She studied English at Mile End based Queen Mary College, University of London and graduated in 1953 and is an honorary fellow of the college.

Her archive costs the library �20,000 and fills nine boxes of notebooks, letters, typescripts and proofs of her novels and non-fiction and will be available for study at the British Library in St Pancras alongside the archives of playwright Harold Pinter and poet Ted Hughes.

Figes was one of the foremost voices in the feminist movement of the sixties and seventies and published her first novel Equinox in 1966.

Her book Journey to Nowhere which was published last year described how her family's maid escaped the Nazis.