Richard Holmes is the author of the prize-winning and bestselling The Age of Wonder, which was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize and won the Royal Society Prize for Science Books and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction. He has written many other books including ‘Falling Upwards’, an uplifting account of the pioneering generation of balloon aeronauts, and the classic ‘Footsteps’. Its companion volume ‘Sidetracks’ and ‘This Long Pursuit’ complete this trilogy. His first biography, ‘Shelley: The Pursuit’, won the Somerset Maugham Prize; ‘Coleridge: Early Visions’ won the 1989 Whitbread Book of the Year Award; ‘Coleridge: Darker Reflections’ won the Duff Cooper and the Heinemann Awards; ‘Dr Johnson & Mr Savage’ won the James Tait Black Prize. He holds honorary doctorates from the Universities of East Anglia, East London and Kingston, and was Professor of Biographical Studies at the University of East Anglia from 2001 to 2007. He is an Honorary Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge, a Fellow of the British Academy, and was awarded the OBE in 1992. He lives in London and Norfolk with the novelist Rose Tremain.
Richard Holmes was born in London in 1945 and educated at Downside School and Churchill College, Cambridge.
In 1974 his Shelley: The Pursuit won the Somerset Maugham Award and was described by Stephen Spender as ‘surely the best biography of Shelley ever written’. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, was awarded an OBE in 1992 and the Biographers' Club Lifetime Services to Biography Prize in 2014.
He lives in London and Norwich with the novelist Rose Tremain.
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