Richard Holmes

Richard Gordon Heath Holmes, OBE, FRSL, FBA (born 5 November 1945) is a British author and academic best known for his biographical studies of major figures of British and French Romanticism. Biography Richard Gordon Heath Holmes was born on 5 November 1945 in London. He was educated at Downside School, Somerset, and Churchill College, Cambridge. He is a fellow of The Royal Society of Literature and a Fellow of the British Academy. He was professor of Biographical Studies at the University of East Anglia from 2001 to 2007 and has honorary doctorates from the University of East London, University of Kingston, and the Tavistock Institute. In the 1992 Birthday Honours, he was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE). He lives in London and Norfolk with his wife, British novelist Rose Tremain. Literary biography Holmes's major works of Romantic biography include: Shelley: The Pursuit which won him the Somerset Maugham Award in 1974; Coleridge: Early Visions, which won him the 1989 Whitbread Book of the Year Prize (now the Costa Book Awards); Coleridge: Darker Reflections, the second and final volume of his Coleridge biography which won the Duff Cooper Prize and the Heinemann Award; and Dr. Johnson and Mr. Savage, concerning the friendship between eighteenth-century British literary figures Samuel Johnson and Richard Savage, which won the James Tait Black Prize. Holmes is also the author of two studies of European biography. Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer is a highly acclaimed volume of memoirs and personal reflections on the biographer's art and Sidetracks: Explorations of a Romantic Biographer collects his shorter pieces, including an early, groundbreaking essay on Thomas Chatterton and an introductory account of the lives and works of Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin.