Eleanor Turner was born in 1982 in Essex, where she started learning the harp at the age of five. In 1993 she began her formal musical education at the Royal College of Music Junior Department, studying harp with Daphne Boden and composition with Dr Peter Fribbins, and it was there that she was inspired to make her career as a concert harpist and composer. She went on to study harp with Alison Nicholls and enjoys taking lessons and courses with other harpists and musicians both in the UK and abroad.
In 2002 Eleanor won the Royal Over-Seas League Award for Strings and Marisa Robles Harp Prize. The following year her harp duo ‘Double Action’ won Third Prize at the Fifth International Competition for Chamber Music with Harp in Arles, France, and was then chosen to perform in the Park Lane Group Young Artists Series. In 2005 Eleanor received a Philip and Dorothy Green Award from Making Music.
In 2007 Eleanor won First Prize, a £20,000 Salvi concert harp, in the European Harp Competition. In the same competition she won the William Mathias Prize for her interpretation of that composer’s ‘Santa Fé Suite’. The highlight of 2008 was to receive one of the Worshipful Company of Musicians’ Maisie Lewis Awards, which led to Eleanor’s solo Wigmore Hall debut in October 2008.
Over the past ten years Eleanor has performed at World Harp Congresses in Prague, Dublin and Amsterdam, and she has recently given many solo recitals across Italy, Spain and The Netherlands. Eleanor also composes chamber music for concert and ballet and has had commissions from the Park Lane Group and Independent Ballet Wales. She also enjoys performing music by other contemporary composers and in February 2009 commissioned a new solo harp piece by Thomas Hewitt Jones. She lives in Stamford, England, where she teaches fifteen harpists!