Francis Spufford
Francis Spufford, FRSL (born 1964) is an English author.
Early life
Spufford was born in 1964. He is the son of the late social historian Professor Margaret Spufford (1935 - 2014) and the economic historian Professor Peter Spufford. He studied English Literature at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, gaining a BA in 1985.
Career
He was Chief Publisher's Reader from 1987–90 for Chatto & Windus.
Spufford was a Royal Literary Fund fellow at Anglia Ruskin University from 2005 to 2007, and since 2008 has taught at Goldsmiths College in London on the MA in Creative and Life Writing there.[1]
Publications
Spufford specializes in works of non-fiction.
- I May Be Some Time: Ice and the English Imagination, 1996 - won literary prizes including the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, Writers Guild Award for Best Non-Fiction Book of the Year, and the Somerset Maugham Award in 1997.[2]
- The Child That Books Built, 2002
- Backroom Boys: The Secret Return of the British Boffin, 2003 - nominated for the Aventis Prize
- Red Plenty, 2010 - longlisted for the Orwell Prize, and translated into Dutch, Spanish, Estonian, Polish, German, Russian and Italian, with a version in Turkish following. This is a fusion of history and fiction which dramatises the period in the history of the USSR (c.1960) when it seemed possible that communism could create greater abundance than capitalism. It is influenced by science fiction, and uses many of its tools, but is not itself SF.
- Unapologetic, 2012, translated into Dutch as Dit is Geen Verdediging, 2013, into Spanish as Impenitente and German as Heilige (Un)Vernunft!, 2014.
He has also edited three anthologies: The Chatto Book of Cabbages and Kings, 1989, about lists used as a literary device, The Chatto Book of the Devil, 1993, and The Antarctic, 2008.
Personal life
He lives just outside Cambridge. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He is a practising Christian and is married to a vicar, the Reverend Dr Jessica Martin, who is the Rector of Duxford.[3] In 2015, he was elected to General Synod as a lay representative of the Diocese of Ely.[4]
