Robert Douglas-Fairhurst

Robert Douglas-Fairhurst is a Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Magdalen College. He is the author of many titles in the field of nineteenth-century literature including Becoming Dickens and Victorian Afterlives, and has also produced editions of Dickens's Christmas stories, Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor and a collected edition of Peter Pan which brings together five of the main versions of the story. Becoming Dickens: The Invention of a Novelist was featured on ‘The Review Show’ (BBC2), and won the 2012 Duff Cooper Prize; it was also selected as a book of the year in the Irish Times, Library Journal, New Statesman, Sunday Times, Daily Telegraph, TLS, and Wall Street Journal, and was an Editor’s Choice in the New York Times. The Story of Alice: Lewis Carroll and the Secret History of Wonderland was featured on Start the Week (BBC R4) and BBC1 Breakfast and serialised as Book of the Week on BBC R4 read by Simon Russell Beale; it was shortlisted for the Costa Prize in 2015. The Turning Point: A Year that Changed Dickens and the World was selected as a book of the year in the Times, Financial Times, Spectator, and New Statesman. His darkly comic and moving memoir Metamorphosis: A Life in Pieces was published in 2023, alongside interviews on R4’s Today programme, BBC 5Live, Times Radio, ABC Australia and France 24. It featured in the Sunday Times magazine and Observer magazine and was serialised in the Daily Telegraph. It was also selected by Waterstones as one of the Best Books of 2023. He is also the author of the forthcoming Look Closer: How to Get More Out of Reading.

He writes regularly for publications including Times, Spectator, Literary Review, Guardian, and TLS; other essays and reviews have appeared in publications including the Daily Telegraph, Prospect, and Vogue. Radio and television appearances include Start the Week and The Culture Show, and he has also acted as the historical consultant on BBC productions of Jane Eyre, Emma, Great Expectations, the BBC drama series Dickensian and both of the Enola Holmes feature films for Netflix. He has judged the Man Booker Prize and the Baillie Gifford Prize, and in 2015 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.