Dr Alexandra Harris, a senior lecturer in the University’s Department of English, has been awarded a prestigious fellowship from the Royal Society of Literature (RSL).
The Royal Society of Literature has 500 Fellows and they include most of the very best novelists, short-story writers, poets, playwrights, biographers, historians, travel writers, literary critics and scriptwriters at work today.
At a recent ceremony Dr Harris chose to sign the Fellows’ roll book using TS Eliot’s fountain pen rather than Byron’s quill.
The Royal Society of Literature was founded by George IV in 1820 to celebrate and nurture all that is best in British literature, past and present.
Dr Harris said: “I don’t think I’ve ever been so delighted. It is a great privilege to join a society which includes so many of the people I most admire. It is a great encouragement and inspiration and I hope I shall be able to contribute to the energetic work of the RSL in promoting literary life in this country.”
Dr Harris was one of ten winners of the BBC’s New Generation Thinkers scheme in 2011.
She also won the Guardian First Book Award in 2010 and a Somerset Maugham Award from the Society of Authors for ‘Romantic Moderns: English writers, Artists and Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper’. She is currently finishing a book about English weather and the arts which will be published next year.
