Claire Harman | |
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Occupation | Writer and biographer |
Period | 1989–present |
Subject | Literary biography, short fiction, poetry |
Notable works | Fanny Burney; Jane's Fame: How Jane Austen Conquered the World; Katherine Mansfield and the Art of Risking Everything |
Notable awards | John Lllewyn Rhys Prize; Forward Prize; Tom Gallon Award |
Website | |
www |
Claire Harman is a British literary critic and book reviewer who has written for the Times Literary Supplement , Literary Review , Evening Standard , the Sunday Telegraph and other publications. [1] Harman is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and has taught English at the Universities of Oxford and Manchester. She has taught creative writing at Columbia University, [2] and been Professor of Creative Writing at Durham University since 2016. [3]
Harman won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize in 1989 for her biography of poet Sylvia Townsend Warner. [4] This was followed with eponymous biographies of Fanny Burney [5] in 2000 and Robert Louis Stevenson in 2005. [6] In 2009, Harman published Jane's Fame, a book about the posthumous fame of novelist Jane Austen.
In 2015, Harman published what the Guardian called an 'eminently sensible' [7] biography of Charlotte Bronte. [8] In the same year, she won the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem of the year for "The Mighty Hudson", first published in the Times Literary Supplement. [9] In 2016, Harman won the ALCS Tom-Gallon Trust Award for a short story. [10] This was followed by Murder by the Book; A Sensational Chapter in Victorian Crime [11] in 2018.
Harman returned to literary biography with the 'innovative' [12] All Sorts of Lives: Katherine Mansfield and the Art of Risking Everything [13] in 2023.
Harman was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2006. She is a judge of the J.R. Ackerley Prize.
Frances Burney, also known as Fanny Burney and later Madame d'Arblay, was an English satirical novelist, diarist and playwright. In 1786–1790 she held the post of "Keeper of the Robes" to Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, George III's queen. In 1793, aged 41, she married a French exile, General Alexandre d'Arblay. After a long writing career and wartime travels that stranded her in France for over a decade, she settled in Bath, England, where she died on 6 January 1840. The first of her four novels, Evelina (1778), was the most successful and remains her most highly regarded, followed by Cecilia (1782). Most of her stage plays were not performed in her lifetime. She wrote a memoir of her father (1832) and many letters and journals that have been gradually published since 1889, forty-nine years after her death.
Kathleen Mansfield Murry was a New Zealand writer and critic who was an important figure in the modernist movement. Her works are celebrated across the world, and have been published in 25 languages.
Theodore Francis Powys – published as T. F. Powys – was a British novelist and short-story writer. He is best remembered for his allegorical novel Mr. Weston's Good Wine (1927), where Weston the wine merchant is evidently God. Powys was influenced by the Bible, John Bunyan, Jonathan Swift and other writers of the 17th and 18th centuries, as well as later writers such as Thomas Hardy and Friedrich Nietzsche.
Dame Antonia Susan Duffy, known professionally by her former married name, A. S. Byatt, was an English critic, novelist, poet and short story writer. Her books have been translated into more than thirty languages.
Claire Tomalin is an English journalist and biographer known for her biographies of Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Samuel Pepys, Jane Austen and Mary Wollstonecraft.
Sir Michael de Courcy Fraser Holroyd is an English biographer.
Chatto & Windus is an imprint of Penguin Random House that was formerly an independent book publishing company founded in London in 1855 by John Camden Hotten. Following Hotten's death, the firm would reorganize under the names of his business partner Andrew Chatto and poet William Edward Windus. The company was purchased by Random House in 1987 and is now a sub-imprint of Vintage Books within the Penguin UK division.
Richard Thomas Mabey is a writer and broadcaster, chiefly on the relations between nature and culture.
The T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry is a prize for poetry awarded by the T. S. Eliot Foundation. For many years it was awarded by the Eliots' Poetry Book Society (UK) to "the best collection of new verse in English first published in the UK or the Republic of Ireland" in any particular year. The Prize was inaugurated in 1993 in celebration of the Poetry Book Society's 40th birthday and in honour of its founding poet, T. S. Eliot. Since its inception, the prize money was donated by Eliot's widow, Mrs Valerie Eliot and more recently it has been given by the T. S. Eliot Estate.
Dame Marina Sarah Warner, is an English historian, mythographer, art critic, novelist and short story writer. She is known for her many non-fiction books relating to feminism and myth. She has written for many publications, including The London Review of Books, the New Statesman, Sunday Times and Vogue. She has been a visiting professor, given lectures and taught on the faculties of many universities.
Timothy Harold Parks is a British novelist, author of nonfiction, translator from Italian to English, and professor of literature.
Lyndall Gordon is a British-based biographical and former academic writer, known for her literary biographies. She is a senior research fellow at St Hilda's College, Oxford.
Lynne Reid Banks was a British author of books for children and adults, including The Indian in the Cupboard, which has sold over 15 million copies and has been successfully adapted to film. Her first novel, The L-Shaped Room, published in 1960, was an instant and lasting best seller. It was later made into a movie of the same name and led to two sequels, The Backward Shadow and Two is Lonely. Banks also wrote a biography of the Brontë family, entitled Dark Quartet, and a sequel about Charlotte Brontë, Path to the Silent Country.
Dr Ruth Scurr FRSL, aka Lady Stothard, is a British writer, historian and literary critic. She is a Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge.
Winifred Eveleen Gérin, née Bourne, was an English biographer born in Hamburg. She is best known as a biographer of the Brontë sisters and their brother Branwell, whose lives she researched extensively. Charlotte Brontë: the Evolution of Genius (1967) is regarded as her seminal work and received the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the Rose Mary Crawshay Prize and the Royal Society of Literature Heinemann prize.
Carol Rumens FRSL is a British poet.
The Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Literary Prize is an annual British literary prize inaugurated in 1977. It is named after the host Jewish Quarterly and the prize's founder Harold Hyam Wingate. The award recognises Jewish and non-Jewish writers resident in the UK, British Commonwealth, Europe and Israel who "stimulate an interest in themes of Jewish concern while appealing to the general reader". As of 2011 the winner receives £4,000.
The biographer, cultural historian and critic Jeremy Treglown is an Emeritus Professor at the University of Warwick. He was editor of The Times Literary Supplement through the 1980s and chair of the Arvon Foundation, 2017–22.
Sarah Bakewell is a British author and professor. She lives in London. She received the Windham–Campbell Literature Prize in Non-Fiction.
Diana Omo Evans FRSL is a British novelist, journalist and critic who was born and lives in London. Evans has written four full-length novels. Her first novel, 26a, published in 2005, won the Orange Award for New Writers, the Betty Trask Award and the deciBel Writer of the Year award. Her third novel Ordinary People was shortlisted for the 2019 Women's Prize for Fiction and won the 2019 South Bank Sky Arts Award for Literature. A House for Alice was published in 2023.