Frances Wilson

Frances Wilson (born 1964) is an English author, academic, and critic.

Biography Born in Malawi, Wilson attended The Mount School, York, and read English literature at St Hugh's College, Oxford. She studied Henry James and Freud for her DPhil from the Sussex University. After that she taught English literature at Reading University for ten years, leaving in 2005 to become a full-time writer.

Wilson has reviewed for The Times Literary Supplement, The Spectator, The Oldie, New Statesman, The Guardian, and The Daily Telegraph, and has been a judge for the Whitbread Biography Prize, the Man Booker Prize, the Baillie Gifford Prize, and was chair of the 2020 Goldsmiths Prize. She has been writer in residence at Somerset House and University College London, taught a University of East Anglia/Guardian Masterclass in Biography and has been a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature since 2009. From 2016 until 2021 Wislon taught creative writing and English literature at Goldsmiths, University of London. She is a co-founder of the how to Academy.

Wilson was the Jean Strouse Fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library from 2018 to 2019, where she worked on a biography of D. H. Lawrence, which was published by FSG in America and by Bloomsbury Circus in the UK in 2021.