Novelist, poet, scholar

ros barber writer

Ros Barber is a writer, academic and speaker. Her debut novel The Marlowe Papers (2012) won the Desmond Elliott Prize, jointly won the Author’s Club Best First Novel Award, and was longlisted for the Bailey’s Women’s Prize for Fiction.  Her second novel Devotion (2015) was shortlisted for the Encore Award. In the UK, her poem ‘Material’ is on the Edexcel ‘A’ Level English Literature syllabus and her poem ‘How to Leave the World That Worships Should‘ had been set on both ‘A’ Level and GSCE exam papers.

She is a senior lecturer in the English and Comparative Literature Department of Goldsmiths, University of London, since 2013, having previously taught Creative Writing for 12 years at the University of Sussex. She is a literary historian focused on the Early Modern period, in particular, the poet and dramatist Christopher Marlowe, and his social circle. She is also published in the field of  what is known as ‘computational stylistics’. She has an abiding interest in picking apart the arguments made on both sides of the Shakespeare authorship question, and more generally, in how we form our beliefs, and turn beliefs into ‘certainties’.

She is currently writing her third novel, The Tragical History of Nothing, an epic adventure yarn base on the life of an 18th-century female footboy, soldier and pirate.

You can also find her on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter.