Richard Holmes

Richard Holmes was born in London in 1945 and educated at Downside School and Churchill College, Cambridge.

In 1974 he published Shelley: The Pursuit, which won the Somerset Maugham Award and was described by Stephen Spender as “surely the best biography of Shelley ever written”. Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer, which appeared in 1985, was hailed as “a modern masterpiece”. Coleridge: Early Visions, published in 1989, was the highly acclaimed winner of the Whitbread Book of the Year Prize and Dr Johnson and Mr Savage won the James Tait Memorial Prize in 1993. In 1996 he published Coleridge: Selected Poems, an anthology of 101 poems, which gives a fresh and enlarged sense of Coleridge’s creative powers. In 1998 he published Coleridge: Darker Reflections which covers the later part of Coleridge’s life. The book won both the Duff Cooper Prize and The Heinemann Award. Sidetracks: Explorations of a Romantic Biographer, a collection of twenty pieces assembled from decades of ‘wandering from the straight and narrow’ of his major biographies and held together by a subtle autobiographical thread was published in July 2000. His most recent book, The Age of Wonder, was published in 2008 to excellent reviews.

Richard Holmes has been a regular feature writer and reviewer for The Times and various American journals. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the British Academy and was awarded the OBE in 1992. He lives in London and Norwich with the novelist Rose Tremain.

Titles

 The Age of Wonder  (HarperCollins, 2008)

Southey on Nelson  (editor / Flamingo Classic Biographies series)  (Flamingo, 2002)

Scott on Zelide  (editor / Flamingo Classic Biographies series)  (Flamingo, 2002)

Johnson on Savage  (editor / Flamingo Classic Biographies series)  (Flamingo, 2002)

Godwin on Wollstonecraft  (editor / Flamingo Classic Biographies series)  (Flamingo, 2002)

Gilchrist on Blake  (editor / Flamingo Classic Biographies series)  (Flamingo, 2002)

Defoe on Sheppard and Wild  (editor / Flamingo Classic Biographies series)  (Flamingo, 2002)

Sidetracks: Explorations of a Romantic Biographer  (HarperCollins, 2000)

Coleridge: Darker Reflections  (HarperCollins, 1998)

The Romantic Poets and their Circle  (National Portrait Gallery, 1997)

Coleridge: Selected Poems  (editor)  (HarperCollins, 1996)

Dr Johnson & Mr Savage  (Hodder & Stoughton, 1993)

Coleridge: Early Visions   (Hodder & Stoughton, 1989) 

Mary Wollstonecraft: A Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark   (editor)  (Penguin, 1987)

Kipling: Something of Myself   (with Robert Hampson)  (Penguin, 1987)

Gerard de Nerval: The Chimeras   (with Peter Jay)  (Anvil Press, 1985)

Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer   (Hodder & Stoughton, 1985)

Coleridge   (Past Master Series)  (Oxford University Press, 1982)

Shelley on Love: An Anthology   (editor)  (Anvil Press, 1980)

Theophile Gautier: My Fantoms   (editor and translator)  (Quartet, 1976)

Shelley: The Pursuit  (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1974)

Thomas Chatterton: The Case Reopened  (John Murray, 1970)

One for Sorrow, Two for Joy  (Café Books, 1970)