Lisa Appignanesi

Lisa Appignanesi (born Elżbieta Borensztejn; 4 January 1946) is a British-Canadian writer, novelist, and campaigner for free expression. Until 2021, she was the Chair of the Royal Society of Literature, and is a former President of English PEN and Chair of the Freud Museum London. She chaired the 2017 Man Booker International Prize won by Olga Tokarczuk. She is a founding editor of the website EXPeditions and chair of its editorial advisory board.

She is an Honorary Fellow of St Benet's Hall, Oxford, and visiting professor in the Department of English at King's College London, and held a Wellcome Trust People Award there for her public series on The Brain and the Mind. Her book Mad, Bad, and Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors won the 2009 British Medical Association Award for the Public Understanding of Science, among other prizes. She has written for The New York Review of Books, The Guardian and The Observer, as well as making programmes and appearing on the BBC.

Biography Personal life and education Appignanesi was born Elżbieta Borensztejn on 4 January 1946 into a Jewish family in Łódź, Poland, the daughter of Hena and Aaron Borensztejn. Following her birth, her parents moved to Paris, France, and in 1951 emigrated to Montreal, Quebec, Canada, where she grew up.

She studied at McGill University in Montreal, where she was a features editor for The McGill Daily. In 1966, she earned her BA and in 1967 her MA degree (with a thesis on Edgar Allan Poe) and married writer Richard Appignanesi. After their marriage, the couple moved to England, where she obtained a DPhil degree in Comparative Literature at the University of Sussex in 1970. Lisa Appignanesi lives in London.

Academic work After a year working as a writer in a Manhattan social research firm, Appignanesi returned to Britain to work as a European Studies lecturer at the University of Essex. She left the ICA in 1990 to write full-time.

Writing Olga Tokarczuk and Jennifer Croft with Lisa Appignanesi, chair of the judges for the 2018 Man Booker International Prize. In 1991, Appignanesi published a best-selling novel, Memory and Desire. A major study of Freud's life, ideas and his relations to women, Freud's Women (co-written with John Forrester) was published in 1992.

Appignanesi has co-written two films on Salman Rushdie for French television, presented two series of radio programmes on Sigmund Freud for BBC Radio 4, presented the arts and ideas Nightwaves programme for BBC Three, contributed to a variety of programmes, including Saturday Review, Start the Week and Woman's Hour, and written for the New Writing Partnership. Appignanesi has appeared as a cultural commentator on many television programmes, including the BBC's Newsnight and Late Review. She was General Editor of The Big Ideas series, published by Profile Books, which includes Violence by Slavoj Zizek and Bodies, by Susie Orbach. She worked as a fellow of the Brain and Behaviour Laboratory at the Open University, She has also written for The Guardian,

Appignanesi has been nominated for the Charles Taylor Prize, and the Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Literary Prize for her family memoir Losing the Dead, while her novel The Memory Man was short-listed for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize and won the Canadian Holocaust Fiction Award. Mad, Bad and Sad was short-listed for the Warwick Prize and long-listed for the Samuel Johnson Prize, amongst others, and won several awards. With John Berger, she translated the work of Nella Bielski. The Year is 42 won the Scott Moncrieff Prize for Literary Translation.

In 1987, she was made a Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. She became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (RSL) in 2015 and became the Chair of the Royal Society of Literature Council in 2016. She is also a founding editor of the website EXPeditions and chair of its editorial advisory board. Lisa Appignanesi - Standing up for ideas Lisa Appignanesi - A lifelong passion Lisa Appignanesi on EXPeditions - Women and the mind doctors Lisa Appignanesi on EXPeditions - Extreme emotions in the West Lisa Appignanesi on EXPeditions - Emotions: good, bad and maddening Lisa Appignanesi on EXPeditions - The medicalisation of happiness