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Ruth Scurr
British historian and literary critic From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Ruth Scurr, aka Lady Stothard, is a British writer, historian and literary critic. She is a Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge.[1]
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Education
Scurr was educated at St Bernard's Convent, Slough; Oxford University, Cambridge University and the Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris. She won a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship in 2000.
Works
Scurr's first book, Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution (Chatto & Windus, 2006; Metropolitan Books, 2006),[2][3] won the Franco-British Society Literary Prize (2006),[4] was shortlisted for the Duff Cooper Prize (2006), long-listed for the Samuel Johnson Prize (2007) and was listed among the 100 Best Books of the Decade in The Times in 2009.[5] It has been translated into five languages.
Her second book, John Aubrey: My Own Life (Chatto & Windus, 2015; New York Review of Books, 2016),[6] was shortlisted for the 2015 Costa Biography Award[7] and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.
Her third book, Napoleon: A Life in Gardens and Shadows (Chatto & Windus, 2021; Norton, 2021), was published to critical acclaim[8] on both sides of the Atlantic[9] to mark the 200th anniversary of Napoleon's death. It won the Society for Military History Distinguished Book Award for Biography (2022).[10]
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Career
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Perspective
Scurr began reviewing regularly for The Times and The Times Literary Supplement in 1997.[11] Since then she has also written for The Daily Telegraph,[12] The Observer, New Statesman,[13] The London Review of Books,[14] The New York Review of Books, The Nation,[15] The New York Observer, The Guardian[16] and The Wall Street Journal.[17]
She was a judge on the Man Booker Prize panel in 2007, the Samuel Johnson Prize panel in 2014, and the Baillie Gifford Prize panel in 2023.[18][19][20] She is a member of the Folio Prize Academy.[21]
Scurr is Director of Studies in Human, Social and Political Sciences for Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where she has been a Fellow since 2006. Her research interests include: 17th- and 18th-century history of ideas; biographical, autobiographical and life writing; the British and French Enlightenments; the French Revolution; Revolutionary Memoir; early Feminist Political Thought; and contemporary fiction in English.[22] Scurr is the Senior Treasurer of a Cambridge-based publication, Per Capita Media.[23][24]
Having served on the Council since 2020, Scurr became acting Chair of the council of the Royal Society of Literature in January, 2025.[25]
Bibliography
Books
- Scurr, Ruth (2006). Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution. London: Chatto & Windus.
- — (2015). John Aubrey: My Own Life. London: Chatto & Windus.
- — (2021). Napoleon: A Life Told in Gardens and Shadows. London: Chatto & Windus.
Dissertations, theses
- Scurr, Ruth (2000). The social foundations of the modern republic : P.-L. Roederer's Cours d'organisation sociale (Ph.D.). University of Cambridge.
Critical studies and reviews
- Anon. (11 April 2015). "A man for all seasons". Books and Arts. The Economist. Vol. 415, no. 8933. pp. 74–75. Review of John Aubrey.
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See also
References
External links
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