Also, isn’t it the writer’s task – to transform mere reportage into something with the merit of human understanding and that engages the reader? The difference is in the astonishing degree of gift – but everything else about them is simply human. Not their differences from us, but their similarities to us. If we’re to think about the individuals behind the great works of literature, I think we need to try to understand them, or how they came to write as they did, or anyway what’s individual about them.
I don’t find a procession of facts without any contextual meaning to join them together very interesting. That’s a very kind thing to say! Thank you. Did you sometimes feel like you were merging with your heroines personally while working on their biographies? Which of these women is closer to you mentally or spiritually, if any? You will have done the same with Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Photo courtesy of Ekaterina Voskresenskaya Interview by Svetlana Lavochkina You made Mary Shelley come alive for us, making us feel like her close friends. She is Professor of Poetry at the University of Roehampton and currently working on a new biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. The poems in her new poetry collection Come Down (coming February this year) have received two major European prizes, the 2019 Naim Frashëri Laureateship of Albania and Macedonia, and the 2020 European Lyric Atlas Prize, Bosnia. Her biography, In Search of Mary Shelley (2018), has been internationally critically acclaimed and was shortlisted for the Biographers’ Club’s Slightly Foxed Prize.
National prizes include the Newdigate Prize, Cholmondeley Prize, Hawthornden Fellowship, and various awards from the Arts Councils of England and of Wales, Society of Authors, Poetry Book Society and the Arts and Humanities Research Council.Ī former violinist, she is also a broadcaster and newspaper critic, and was editor of Poetry Review 2005-12. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, Fellow of the English Association and Fellow of the Wordsworth Trust, she’s also received an MBE from the Queen for services to literature, and published twenty-seven books. Published in thirty-seven languages, she’s received international awards in the US, India, Macedonia, Albania and Bosnia. Fiona Sampson is a leading British poet and writer.
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