Lucasta Miller

Dr Lucasta Miller’s first book, The Bronte Myth (2001), was an influential study in biographical reputation. It was reissued in 2020, with a new introduction, as a classic of modern literary life-writing. In the early 2000s, she focused on journalism, writing longform profiles for the Guardian. Her second book, L.E.L.: The Lost Life and Mysterious Death of the ‘Female Byron’, was a forensic investigation into the buried history of a once celebrated female Romantic poet. It was shortlisted for the NBCC Awards in the USA in 2019.

Lucasta is interested in exploring new ways of writing literary biography, as in her recent, acclaimed Keats: A Brief Life in Nine Poems and One Epitaph (2021) (“Outstanding” – Sunday Times; “Brilliant” – New Statesman). She is currently working on Coleridge and the Ancient Mariner: A Voyage into the Rime, which will be published by Bloomsbury in 2024.

A regular speaker at literary festivals, Lucasta has lectured and broadcast on 19^th-century literature in the UK, US and Europe, and has been a Visiting Fellow at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, a Visiting Scholar at Wolfson College, Oxford, an Honorary Research Associate at UCL, and a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at the Courtauld Institute. She has reviewed for every British broadsheet, judged the Man Booker Prize, sat on the Trustee boards of the London Library and the Wordsworth Trust, and was founding editorial director of Notting Hill Editions.