Daisy Hay

Daisy Hay is Associate Professor in English Literature and Life Writing at the University of Exeter and an author of non-fiction. Hay was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2018.

Career Hay's research interests are in late eighteenth- and early-to-mid nineteenth-century literature in Britain, focusing on the intersections of literature, history and politics.

She was a Bye-Fellow at Murray Edwards College, Cambridge, from 2006 to 2009, and the Alistair Horne Fellow at St Antony's College, Oxford, from 2009 to 2010. Hay's broadcast proposal was on how Benjamin Disraeli changed politics, by using his private life in a public way to win votes, and was based on Hay's biography of Disraeli and his wife Mary Anne Disraeli.

Awards Hay was awarded the Rose Mary Crawshay Prize for literary scholarship by the British Academy, for her first book Young Romantics: The Shelleys, Byron and Other Tangled Lives, published in 2010. In 2012, she was awarded a fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.

In 2016, Hay won the Somerset Maugham Award for her second book Mr & Mrs Disraeli – A Strange Romance, a biography of the politician Benjamin Disraeli and his wife Mary Anne Disraeli.

Publications Hay is the author of four published non-fiction books. Her first book, Young Romantics: The Shelleys, Byron and Other Tangled Lives, was published in 2010 by Bloomsbury.

Hay's third book was published in September 2018, titled The Making of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

Her fourth book was published in Fall 2022, titled Dinner with Joseph Johnson: Books and Friendship in a Revolutionary Age. It was published simultaneously in London by Chatto and Windus and in the United States by Princeton University Press.