Richard Holmes is the author of Shelley: The Pursuit (published by NYRB Classics), which won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1974; Coleridge: Early Visions, winner of the 1989 Whitbread Book of the Year award; Dr Johnson & Mr Savage, which won the 1993 James Tait Black Prize; and Coleridge: Darker Reflections, which won the 1990 Duff Cooper Prize and Heinemann Award. His other works include Footsteps (1985) and Sidetracks (2000). He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and was awarded the Order of the British Empire in 1992. He is also a professor of biographical studies at the University of East Anglia. He lives in London and Norwich with the novelist Rose Tremain.
Books
My Fantoms
The famed biographer of Shelley and Coleridge, Richard Holmes, compiles fantastical stories of love and death and from France’s leading Romantic, friend of Hugo, and dedicatee of Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal. “It is in Gautier that we first seem to find an authentic French sense of the the unreal world…[it] is recognizable at once as something alike genuine and profound.”—H.P. Lovecraft
Shelley: The Pursuit
Here we have the real Shelley at last—radical agitator, atheist, and apostle of free love, as well as a brilliant and uncompromising poetic innovator.