Frances Wilson

Born in Malawi, she attended The Mount School, York and read English literature at St Hugh’s College, Oxford. She received a DPhil on Henry James and Freud from Sussex University and taught English literature at Reading University for ten years, leaving in 2005 to become a full-time writer. She reviews for The Times Literary Supplement, The Spectator, The Oldie, The New Statesmen, The Guardian, and The Daily Telegraph. She has also been a judge for the Whitbread Biography Prize, the Baillie Gifford Prize and was chair of the 2020 Goldsmiths Prize. She has been writer in residence at Somerset House and University College London and has been a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature since 2009. From 2016-21 she taught creative writing and English literature at Goldsmiths, University of London. Wilson was the Jean Strouse Fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library from 2018-19, where she worked on a biography of D.H. Lawrence, published in 2021. Her other works include The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth (2008), winner of the British Academy’s Rose Mary Crawshay Prize and How To Survive the Titanic; or The Sinking of J Bruce Ismay (2011) which was the winner of the 2012 Elizabeth Longford Prize for historical biography.