Frances Wilson (writer)

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 PhD 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. She reviews for The Times Literary Supplement, The Spectator, The Oldie, The New Statesmen, The Guardian, and The Daily Telegraph, and has been a judge for the Whitbread Biography Prize, the Man Booker Prize, the Baillie Gifford Prize, and is currently the 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. Since 2016, she has taught creative writing and English literature at Goldsmiths, University of London. She is a co-founder of the how to: Academy.

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 to 2019, where she worked on a biography of D.H. Lawrence to be published by FSG in America and Bloomsbury in the UK in 2021.

Works

Wilson is author of five books:

• Literary Seductions: Compulsive Writers and Diverted Readers (Faber, 1999).
• The Courtesan’s Revenge: Harriette Wilson, the Woman Who Blackmailed the King (Faber, 2003).
• The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth (Faber, 2008) Winner of the British Academy's Rose Mary Crawshay Prize.
• How To Survive the Titanic; or The Sinking of J Bruce Ismay (Bloomsbury, 2011) Winner of the Elizabeth Longford Prize for historical biography, 2012.
• Guilty Thing: A Life of Thomas De Quincey (Bloomsbury, 2016) Longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize 2016, short-listed for the National Book Critics Circles Award, the LA Times Book Awards, the Historical Writers' Association Non-fiction Crown award 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.

She has written introductions to

• 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, Roxanna (Folio Society, 2010).
• Thomas Bernhard My Prizes: An Accounting (Notting Hill Editions, 2012).