The novelist Elizabeth Taylor died in Penn in 1975. Medical pioneers Dr Louisa Garrett Anderson and Dr Flora Murray and the children's writer Alison Uttley, author of the Little Grey Rabbit stories, are buried in the churchyard of Holy Trinity. In 1983, the ashes of the British spy Donald Maclean were scattered in the churchyard. Canadian author Margaret Laurence (1926–1987) lived on Beacon Hill, Penn, between 1963 and 1973, in a house previously owned by the politician Sir Donald Maclean and Lady Maclean, parents of the British spy.