Francis Spufford FRSL (born 1964)[citation needed] is an English author and teacher of writing whose career has seen him shift gradually from non-fictiontofiction. His first novel Golden Hill received critical acclaim and numerous prizes including the Costa Book Award for a first novel,[1] the Desmond Elliott Prize[2] and the Ondaatje Prize.[3] In 2007 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
He was Chief Publisher's Reader from 1987–1990 for Chatto & Windus.
Spufford was a Royal Literary Fund fellow at Anglia Ruskin University from 2005 to 2007, and since 2008 has taught at Goldsmiths College in London on the MA in Creative and Life Writing there. In 2018 he was made a professor.[4]
Spufford specialized in non-fiction for the first part of his career, but began a transition towards fiction in 2010. In 2016 he for the first time published a book which could indisputably be classified as a novel.
Spufford has also edited three anthologies: The Chatto Book of Cabbages and Kings (1989) (about lists used as a literary device), The Chatto Book of the Devil (1992), and The Antarctic (2008).
In March 2019, it was reported that Spufford had written an unofficial novel, The Stone Table, set in the universe of C. S. Lewis’s Narnia series. This takes place during a gap in fictional fiction between The Magician's Nephew and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Spufford distributed self-printed copies to friends. The novel was praised as a "seamless recreation of Lewis’s writing-style". The author hoped to obtain permission from the C. S. Lewis estate to publish it commercially. In the absence of permission, the earliest publication date would be 2034, seventy years after Lewis’s death, when the copyright on the original books will expire in the UK.[11]
Spufford was born in 1964.[citation needed] He is the son of social historian Margaret Spufford (1935–2014) and economic historian Professor Peter Spufford (1934–2017). He studied English literature at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, gaining a BA in 1985.
Spufford lives just outside Cambridge and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He is a practising Christian and is married to an Anglican priest, the Reverend Dr Jessica Martin, who is a Residentiary CanonofEly Cathedral.[12] He served from 2015 to 2021 on General Synod as a lay representative of the Diocese of Ely.[13]