Award-winning Writer, Speaker, Researcher - Ros Barber

Writer

Ros Barber is an award-winning writer of both fiction and non-fiction. Winner of the Desmond Elliott Prize and the Author’s Club Best First Novel Award for her debut The Marlowe Papers, which was also longlisted for the Women’s Prize. Her second novel, Devotion, described as “an unexpectedly piercing exploration of loss” by Kirkus Reviews, was shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature’s Encore Prize. With a […]

Speaker

An award-winning novelist and former Senior Lecturer who transforms trauma into wisdom through engaging storytelling. After 27 years teaching creative writing at university level, Ros now helps high-achieving women recognize patterns of abuse, manipulation, and self-sabotage through psychological excavation disguised as powerful personal stories. Academic Credentials: PhD, Desmond Elliott Prize winner for The Marlowe Papers, […]

Academic

Director of Research at the Shakespearean Authorship Trust, Dr Barber is the author and presenter of Coursera’s Introduction to Who Wrote Shakespeare, editor and co-author of 30-Second Shakespeare (2015), also published as Know-It-All Shakespeare. She is the author of the online compendium Shakespeare: the Evidence. She has published numerous peer-reviewed articles on Early Modern literary […]

Award-winning Writer, Speaker, Researcher

Hello. I’m Ros Barber

Award-winning novelist. Historian. EFT practitioner. Former mainframe programmer, beekeeper, band frontwoman, and the person responsible for standardising the baby change sign across the UK and Europe. I have a PhD in English Literature, a BSc in biology, and deep expertise in 16th-century spy-playwright Christopher Marlowe. I’ve been a Senior Lecturer and a cleaner. I’ve raised four children (they dispute this).

If that combination doesn’t quite cohere — welcome to the mind of a neurodivergent polymath.

I write about how to stay sane, curious, and human in a world that seems determined to make that difficult. Over 6,000 readers think it’s worth their time. I’d love you to join them.

Or look around — some of this site is written in the third person, because in the first person it would be deeply embarrassing. (I’m still working on that.)