Robert Douglas-Fairhurst

Robert Douglas-Fairhurst is Fellow and Tutor in English at Magdalen College, Oxford. He is the author of Becoming Dickens and Victorian Afterlives, and has also produced editions of Dickens's Christmas stories and Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor. Becoming Dickens was featured on ‘The Review Show’ (BBC2), and won the 2012 Duff Cooper Prize for biography; it was also selected as a book of the year in the Irish Times, Library Journal, New Statesman, Sunday Times, Daily Telegraph, TLS, and Wall Street Journal. The Story of Alice: Lewis Carroll and the Secret History of Wonderland (Harvill Secker; Harvard University Press, 2015) was an Editor’s Choice in the New York Times, and was featured on Start the Week (BBC R4) and BBC Breakfast (BBC1); it was also chosen as a Book of the Week on Radio 4, read by Simon Russell Beale, and was one of Time Magazine’s Top 10 books of 2015. Douglas-Fairhurst's latest work is a collected edition of Peter Pan which brings together five of the main versions of the story.

He writes regularly for publications including the Daily Telegraph, TLS, New Statesman and Art Newspaper. Radio and television appearances include Start the Week and The Culture Show, and he has also acted as the historical consultant on BBC productions of Jane Eyre, Emma and Great Expectations. In 2015 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He lives in Oxford.