Ruth Scurr
Template:Short description Template:Use dmy dates
Script error: No such module "infobox".Script error: No such module "Check for unknown parameters".Script error: No such module "Check for clobbered parameters".Template:Wikidata image
Ruth Scurr, aka Lady Stothard, is a British writer, historian and literary critic. She is a Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge.[1]
Education
Scurr was educated at St Bernard's Convent, Slough; Oxford University, Cambridge University and the Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris. She won a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship in 2000.
Works
Scurr's first book, Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution (Chatto & Windus, 2006; Metropolitan Books, 2006),[2][3] won the Franco-British Society Literary Prize (2006),[4] was shortlisted for the Duff Cooper Prize (2006), long-listed for the Samuel Johnson Prize (2007) and was listed among the 100 Best Books of the Decade in The Times in 2009.[5] It has been translated into five languages.
Her second book, John Aubrey: My Own Life (Chatto & Windus, 2015; New York Review of Books, 2016),[6] was shortlisted for the 2015 Costa Biography Award[7] and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.
Her third book, Napoleon: A Life in Gardens and Shadows (Chatto & Windus, 2021; Norton, 2021), was published to critical acclaim[8] on both sides of the Atlantic[9] to mark the 200th anniversary of Napoleon's death. It won the Society for Military History Distinguished Book Award for Biography (2022).[10]
Career
Scurr began reviewing regularly for The Times and The Times Literary Supplement in 1997.[11] Since then she has also written for The Daily Telegraph,[12] The Observer, New Statesman,[13] The London Review of Books,[14] The New York Review of Books, The Nation,[15] The New York Observer, The Guardian[16] and The Wall Street Journal.[17]
She was a judge on the Man Booker Prize panel in 2007, the Samuel Johnson Prize panel in 2014, and the Baillie Gifford Prize panel in 2023.[18][19][20] She is a member of the Folio Prize Academy.[21]
Scurr is Director of Studies in Human, Social and Political Sciences for Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where she has been a Fellow since 2006. Her research interests include: 17th- and 18th-century history of ideas; biographical, autobiographical and life writing; the British and French Enlightenments; the French Revolution; Revolutionary Memoir; early Feminist Political Thought; and contemporary fiction in English.[22] Scurr is the Senior Treasurer of a Cambridge-based publication, Per Capita Media.[23][24]
Having served on the Council since 2020, Scurr became acting Chair of the council of the Royal Society of Literature in January, 2025.[25]
Bibliography
Books
- Script error: No such module "citation/CS1".
- Script error: No such module "citation/CS1".
- Script error: No such module "citation/CS1".
Dissertations, theses
Critical studies and reviews
- Script error: No such module "citation/CS1". Review of John Aubrey.
See also
References
<templatestyles src="Reflist/styles.css" />
- ↑ Script error: No such module "citation/CS1".
- ↑ Script error: No such module "citation/CS1".
- ↑ Script error: No such module "citation/CS1".
- ↑ Script error: No such module "citation/CS1".
- ↑ Script error: No such module "citation/CS1".
- ↑ Script error: No such module "citation/CS1".
- ↑ Script error: No such module "citation/CS1".
- ↑ Script error: No such module "citation/CS1".
- ↑ Script error: No such module "citation/CS1".
- ↑ |website=www.smh-hq.org/awards/books.html|
- ↑ Script error: No such module "citation/CS1".
- ↑ Script error: No such module "citation/CS1".
- ↑ Script error: No such module "citation/CS1".
- ↑ Script error: No such module "citation/CS1".
- ↑ Script error: No such module "citation/CS1".
- ↑ Script error: No such module "citation/CS1".
- ↑ Script error: No such module "citation/CS1".
- ↑ Script error: No such module "citation/CS1".
- ↑ Script error: No such module "citation/CS1".
- ↑ Script error: No such module "citation/CS1".
- ↑ Script error: No such module "citation/CS1".
- ↑ Script error: No such module "citation/CS1".
- ↑ Script error: No such module "citation/CS1".
- ↑ Script error: No such module "citation/CS1".
- ↑ Script error: No such module "citation/CS1".
Script error: No such module "Check for unknown parameters".