Novelist
Ros Barber is the author of two novels, Devotion (2015) and The Marlowe Papers (2012). In 2013, The Marlowe Papers was awarded the Desmond Elliott Prize, jointly awarded the Author’s Club Best First Novel Award, and long-listed for the Women’s Prize (formerly Orange Prize) for fiction. Devotion was shortlist for the Royal Society of Literatures’s Encore Prize.
She has written three collections of poetry; the most recent (Material, 2008) a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Her poems have appeared in numerous publications and anthologies, including Faber’s Poems of the Decade (2012) – now set text for the Edexcel ‘A’ Level in English Literature – and Penguin’s The Poetry of Sex (2014).
Scholar
Dr Barber gained her PhD in English Literature in 2011. She specialises in Early Modern literary biography, with a focus on the Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe. With a background as a computer programmer, she has also ventured into computational stylistics (the attempt to determine an author’s style by running text through specific algorithms).
She has given papers at conferences at Queens University Belfast, the Institute of Ideas, Ashland Oregon, and The Globe Theatre in London, as well as presenting three times at the Marlowe Society of America Conference. Peer-reviewed articles published in the Journal of Early Modern Studies, Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, Critical Survey, Notes & Queries, American Notes & Queries, and others.
Dr Barber is three times joint winner of the annual Calvin & Rose G Hoffman Prize for a distinguished work on Christopher Marlowe (2011, 2014, 2018).
A senior lecturer in Creative and Life Writing at Goldsmiths, University of London, and Director of Research at the Shakespearean Authorship Trust, she is editor of 30 Second Shakespeare (2015) and the author of ongoing e-book project Shakespeare: The Evidence. For further details and links to her published academic articles, go here.
Creative Writing Tutor
Ros began teaching Creative Writing for the University of Sussex on both undergraduate and postgraduate courses in 1997. Her post at Goldsmiths, University of London began in 2013. She has taught a monthly poetry workshop for the Poetry School since 2014.