Richard Holmes

Richard Holmes was born in London in November 1945. He is the author of The Age of Wonder, which won the Royal Society Prize for Science Books (UK) and the National Books Critics Circle Award (USA) and was one of the ten New York Times's Best Books of the Year in 2009. His balloon book, Falling Upwards was chosen as a Best Book of the Year by seven newspapers in 2013. His other biographies include Shelley:The Pursuit (winner of the Somerset Maugham Prize), Coleridge: Early Visions (1989 Whitbread Book of the Year Award); and Coleridge: Darker Reflections (1999 Duff Cooper Prize). Dr Johnson & Mr Savage won the 1993 James Tait Black Prize. He has been shortlisted for the Johnson/Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction (UK) three times. This Long Pursuit (2016) completes the autobiographical trilogy he began with Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer (1985) and Sidetracks (2000). The Boundless Deep: Young Tennyson and the Crisis of Belief was chosen as a Best Book of the Year by eight newspapers and bookshops (UK) in 2025. Holmes was awarded the OBE in 1992, and elected an Honorary Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge, in 2010. He lives in London and Norwich with the novelist Rose Tremain.