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English author, academic, and critic
Frances Wilson (born 1964) is an English author, academic, and critic.
Biography
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 . She taught English literature at
Reading University for ten years, leaving in 2005 to become a full-time writer.
[1] She reviews for
The Times Literary Supplement ,
[2]
The Spectator ,
The Oldie ,
New Statesman ,
The Guardian , and
The Daily Telegraph ,
[3] and has been a judge for the
Whitbread Biography Prize , the
Man Booker 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 , taught a
University of East Anglia /
Guardian Masterclass in Biography and has been a Fellow of the
Royal Society of Literature since 2009. From 2016 until 2021 she taught creative writing and English literature at
Goldsmiths, University of London .
[4] She is a co-founder of the how to Academy.
[5]
Wilson was the Jean Strouse Fellow at the
Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers
[6] at the
New York Public Library from 2018 to 2019, where she worked on a biography of
D.H. Lawrence , which was published by FSG in America and by Bloomsbury Circus in the UK in 2021.
Bibliography
Books
Literary Seductions: Compulsive Writers and Diverted Readers (St. Martin's Press, 2000).
The Courtesan’s Revenge:
Harriette Wilson , the Woman Who Blackmailed the King (Faber & Faber, 2003).
The Ballad of
Dorothy Wordsworth (Faber, 2008) Winner of the
British Academy 's
Rose Mary Crawshay Prize .
[7]
How To Survive the
Titanic ; or The Sinking of
J. Bruce Ismay (Bloomsbury, 2011) Winner of the
Elizabeth Longford Prize for historical biography, 2012.
[8]
Guilty Thing: A Life of
Thomas De Quincey (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2016; Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016) Longlisted for the
Baillie Gifford Prize 2016, shortlisted for the
National Book Critics Circle Award , the LA Times Book Awards, the Historical Writers' Association Non-Fiction Crown award
[9] and the
BIO Plutarch Prize , named Book of the Year in
The Guardian ,
TLS ,
The Spectator , and
The Telegraph , and cited by
Booklist as one of the ten best-reviewed books in America during 2016.
Burning Man: The Ascent of D.H. Lawrence (London: Bloomsbury Circus, 2021); Burning Man: The Trials of D.H. Lawrence (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021).
[10] Winner of the 2022 Plutarch Award, and shortlisted for the
Duff Cooper Prize and the
James Tait Black Memorial Prize .
Introductions, forewords and other contributions
Henry James ,
A Small Boy and Others : Childhood Memoirs (Gibson Square Books, 2001).
Henry James,
The Wings of the Dove (
Folio Society , 2005).
Henry James,
The Ambassadors (Folio Society, 2006).
The Adventures of
Casanova (Folio Society, 2007).
Daniel Defoe ,
Roxana (Folio Society, 2010).
Thomas Bernhard , My Prizes: An Accounting (Notting Hill Editions, 2011).
Lorna Sage ,
Bad Blood (
Fourth Estate , 2020)
D. H. Lawrence , The Man Who Loved Islands: Sixteen Stories by D.H. Lawrence (riverrun editions, 2021)
Book reviews
Year
Review article
Work(s) reviewed
2014
Wilson, Frances (21 November 2014). "Faces in the crowd : as Napoleon roamed, the home front was feverish". New Statesman . 143 (5237): 42–43.
Uglow, Jenny (2014). In these times : living in Britain through Napoleon's wars, 1793-1815 . London: Faber & Faber.
References
International National Academics Other