Lyn Innes

Lyn Innes was born in Australia and grew up on a remote mountain farm. She was educated there via the Blackfriars Correspondence School, before going as a boarder to St Scholastica's College, Sydney, and then the University of Sydney, where her fellow classmates included Les Murray, Clive James, Prue Shaw, and , later, Germaine Greer.

In 1963 Lyn moved to in the United States for 12 years, studying at the University of Oregon and Cornell University. She worked as an organizer for the Mexican-American Farm Workers' Movement in California in 1966 before teaching at Tuskegee Institute, Alabama, and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where she worked with Chinua Achebe as Associate Editor of OKIKE Magazine, and later as co-editor of two volumes of African Short Stories.

In 1975 she joined the School of English at the University of Kent, Canterbury. There she taught African, African-American, Irish, American, and Caribbean literature. In 1993 she became head of the Colonial and Postcolonial Studies Centre at the University of Kent.

Lyn has published books on Chinua Achebe, Irish Literature, the Australian bushranger Ned Kelly, Postcolonial Literature, and African-American Slave narratives.

Most recently she has published the story of her great-grandfather, the last Nawab of Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa, who married an English chambermaid. Her current project is a biography of three African-American Families who fled slavery and racism to seek refuge in England in the 1850s and 1860s.

Lyn is married to Martin Scofield and has two daughters.