English Speaker Biographies

Dr Gavin Alexander

Dr Gavin Alexander is a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of English, University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of Christ’s College, where he is also the Librarian. He works on sixteenth and seventeenth-century English literature. His publications include Writing After Sidney: The Literary Response to Sir Philip Sidney, 1586-1640 (Oxford, 2006), Sidney’s ‘The Defence of Poesy’ and Selected Renaissance Literary Criticism (Penguin Classics, 2004), and a co-edited collection of essays, Renaissance Figures of Speech (Cambridge, 2007). He is running the John Milton 400th Anniversary programme of events at Christ’s College - his students have set up a highly successful website for school and university students working on Paradise Lost. That he spends too much time in the Renaissance may be responsible for his current obsession with fencing; he is also a keen viola player.

Raffaella Barker

Raffaella Barker is the author of seven novels and one children's book, all of which have been widely acclaimed. Her books have become international bestsellers. She is a former life model, film editor and motoring columnist and is currently a regular contributor to the Daily Telegraph, The Sunday Times, The Spectator and Country Life. She also writes short stories for Radio 4. Her debut novel Come and Tell Me Some Lies was published in 1994, followed by The Hook, Hens Dancing, Summertime, Green Grass, the children's book Phosphorescence and A Perfect Life. Her latest book Poppyland was published earlier this year.

Professor Helen Cooper

Professor Helen Cooper has been Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English at the University of Cambridge since 2004 [in the Chair originally founded for C.S. Lewis]. After taking both her BA and PhD at New Hall, Cambridge, she spent 26 years at University College, Oxford, as a tutorial fellow, with responsibility for teaching literature from 1100-1660 and the twentieth century. She has particular interests in Chaucer and in anything that links the medieval and early modern, including both 'after Chaucer' and 'before Shakespeare'. Her books include The Oxford Guides to Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales, Pastoral: Mediaeval into Renaissance, and The English Romance in Time. She has also edited Sir Thomas Malory's Morte Darthur for Oxford World's Classics, and she is the academic adviser to the Cambridge University Press schools series of the Canterbury Tales. She currently organises the academic English side of the Prince's Teaching Institute residential courses.

William Fiennes

William Fiennes is the best-selling author of The Snow Geese which was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize and won the Somerset Maugham Award and the Hawthornden Prize. He was The Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year in 2003. He spent two years as Fellow in the Creative Arts at Wolfson College, Oxford, and is currently Writer-in-Residence at the American School in London as well as at Cranford Community College. He has written for many publications, including The Observer, Granta, The London Review of Books and The Daily Telegraph. The Snow Geese has been translated into seven languages. His second book, The Music Room, will be published by Picador next spring.

Romesh Gunesekera

Romesh Gunesekera is an award-winning writer of fiction and poetry. He was born in Sri Lanka but has lived in Britain for most of his life. His first novel Reef was shortlisted for the 1994 Booker Prize. He is also the author of The Sandglass, (BBC Asia Award) and Heaven’s Edge which was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. His fourth novel The Match, came out in paperback last year. His books are studied on school and university courses in many countries and Reef has been selected by Edexcel as a prescribed text for the new 2008 English Literature A level. He is an Associate Tutor on the graduate writing programme at Goldsmiths College, University of London and is a trustee of the Arvon Foundation (for creative writing). In 2004 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and in 2005 received a National Honour in Sri Lanka. He is one of the First Story Authors starting this year as writer-in-residence at Highgate Wood School in London.

Dr Hester Lees-Jeffries

Dr Hester Lees-Jeffries teaches Shakespeare and early modern literature in Cambridge, where she is a Newton Trust Lecturer in the Faculty of English and a Fellow of St Catharine's College. She came to Cambridge from New Zealand to do a PhD nine years ago and stayed; her first book, England's Helicon: Fountains in Early Modern Literature and Culture, was published by Oxford University Press in 2007. She is currently working on several Shakespeare projects, and last year co-designed the Royal Shakespeare Company's 'Greater Shakespeare' range, otherwise known as the 'Shakespeare Tube Map'. She is passionate about theatre and about teaching, and particularly enjoys introducing students to interdisciplinary methodologies and wider cultural contexts.

Dr Mark Llewellyn

Dr Mark Llewellyn is Faculty Director of Postgraduate Research and Director of the Centre for Victorian Studies at the University of Liverpool. He is also Director of Admissions for the School of English at Liverpool, and currently serves as Membership Secretary of the British Association for Victorian Studies (BAVS). Mark's research interests extend across the nineteenth- and twentieth-centuries, with a particular focus on issues related to gender, sexuality and identity. His most recent work includes the essay collection Metafiction and Metahistory in Contemporary Women's Writing (Palgrave, 2007), and he has also published articles and chapters on the literature and culture of the late nineteenth century and contemporary women's writing. Mark is currently writing a monograph entitled Incest in English Culture, 1835-1908; co-authoring Neo-Victorianism: The Victorians in the Twenty-first Century; and writing the 250,000 word Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Victorian Writers and Writing (forthcoming, 2011).

Professor John Mullan

Professor John Mullan is Professor of English at University College London. He is the author of Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century (OUP), How Novels Work (OUP) and Anonymity: A Secret History of English Literature (Faber and Faber). A broadcaster and journalist as well as an academic, he writes a weekly column on contemporary fiction for the Guardian.

Dr Fred Parker

Dr Fred Parker is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Cambridge and Fellow and Director of Studies at Clare College. He teaches English literature from Milton to Byron, as well as having special interests in Tragedy, Shakespeare, and relations between literature and philosophy. His publications include Johnson's Shakespeare, a defence of Dr Johnson's criticism of Shakespeare as contrasted with Romantic readings, and Scepticism and Literature: an Essay on Pope, Hume, Sterne, and Johnson. His current research is on the Devil in literature and His alleged influence on artistic creativity: Milton, Blake, and Byron figure strongly here. A regular contributor to Prince's Teaching Institute events, he has also learnt something about the challenges of English secondary teaching from watching two of his own children recently take A-level English.

Philip Pullman

Philip Pullman was born in Norwich. His secondary schooling took place in North Wales, and he read English at Exeter College, Oxford, before working as a teacher for 12 years, working in various middle schools in Oxford, where he still lives. He has written novels, plays, and fairy tales, and is best known for his trilogy His Dark Materials, the third book of which, The Amber Spyglass, won the Whitbread Book of the Year award in 2001, the first time the winner of the Children’s Book category was awarded the overall prize. He is also the winner of the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award and the Eleanor Farjeon Award for children’s literature. Pullman has long been interested in the matter of narrative, and his talk at this event forms part of an ongoing study of how story can be analysed in terms of its elementary particles, and what we can learn from this.

Dr Daniel Wakelin

Dr Daniel Wakelin was educated at Ixworth Middle School and Thurston Community College, both in West Suffolk. It was at middle school that he first developed interests in Chaucer and Shakespeare which eventually led him to study English at Trinity Hall in Cambridge. He is now a Fellow of Christ's College and a Lecturer in the Faculty of English in Cambridge. He researches late medieval and early Renaissance literature, especially as it was copied and handled by the original scribes, printers and readers. He teaches literature from the Norman Conquest to Shakespeare, and the English language.