Helen Castor

2022 Booker Prize Judge

Prizes judged: The Booker Prize 2022
Connect: Visit Helen Castor's Helen Castor's Faber profile Helen Castor's Faber profile

Helen Castor was a judge for the 2022 Booker Prize which was won by Shehan Karunatilaka for his book, 'Seven Moons of Maali Almeida'. She is a historian of the middle ages and sixteenth century, a Bye-Fellow of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Her books include the prize-winning Blood & Roses: The Paston Family in the Fifteenth Century, Elizabeth I: A Study in Insecurity and Joan of Arc, dubbed a ‘triumph of history’.

Her book, She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth, was made into a BBC TV series and selected as a book of the year in the Times, the Sunday Times, the Independent, the Financial Times, the Guardian and BBC History Magazine.

Castor has presented a range of programmes for BBC TV and radio and Channel 4, and was part of Channel 4’s live coverage of the reburial of Richard III in Leicester in 2015.

Her introduction to a new edition of William Golding’s Close Quarters will be published in April, and she is currently at work on The Eagle and the Hart, a study of Richard II and Henry IV, due to appear in 2023.

2022 Booker Prize judges

By: Shehan Karunatilaka
Published by: Sort Of Books

Shehan Karunatilaka’s second novel won the Booker Prize in 2022. It is a searing, mordantly funny satire set amid the murderous mayhem of a Sri Lanka beset by civil war