First look

Claire Harman is a British literary critic and book reviewer who has written for the Times Literary Supplement, Literary Review, Evening Standard, the Sunday Telegraph and other publications. Harman is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and has taught English at the Universities of Oxford and Manchester. She has taught creative writing at Columbia University, and been Professor of Creative Writing at Durham University since 2016. Harman won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize in 1989 for her biography of poet Sylvia Townsend Warner. This was followed with eponymous biographies of Fanny Burney in 2000 and Robert Louis Stevenson in 2005.