7th Annual Leon Levy Biography Lecture: Richard Holmes

Richard Holmes has made his mark in two fields, literary biography and science writing. He transfigured the way the Romantic poets are written about with his first book, Shelley: The Pursuit (1974), of which The New York Times noted, “If the art of biography was ever damned, Shelley: The Pursuit redeemed it.” He is best known for his definitive two-volume biography: Coleridge: Early Visions (1989, winner of the Whitbread Book of the Year Award) and Coleridge: Darker Reflections. His other books include Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer (which Stacy Schiff has called a book every biographer secretly wishes he’d written), Sidetracks, and Dr. Johnson & Mr. Savage (winner of the James Tait Black Prize). After ten years of teaching, he published his international bestseller, The Age of Wonder, which won the Royal Society Prize for Science Books and the National Book Critics Circle Award. His most recent book is Falling Upwards: How We Took to the Air. Holmes is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and of the British Academy. In 1992, he was awarded the Order of the British Empire (OBE).