Carole Angier

Carole Angier is the award-winning biographer of Jean Rhys and Primo Levi. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2002.

Before becoming a writer (or rather a published writer), Carole combined bringing up her son with teaching literature and philosophy. She began writing biography in its heyday and for over a decade was a full-time writer. That could not last for ever, however, and she returned to part-time teaching as well as writing. She was an RLF Fellow at the University of Warwick (1999–2003) and Oxford Brookes (2010–11); founded and taught life-writing courses at Warwick (2002–3) and Birkbeck (2005–10); and recently was associate lecturer in creative writing at Oxford Brookes (2011–2013). She was a mentor with Gold Dust for 10 years and in 2013 founded a new mentoring agency, the Writer’s Project.

As the child of refugees, Carole has long been concerned with the plight of refugees and asylum-seekers. She has worked with many exiled and refugee writers, editing and publishing, for instance, The Story of My Life: refugees writing in Oxford (2005), Lyla and Majnon: poems of Hasan Bamyani (2008) and See How I Land: Oxford poets and exiled writers (2009). Since 2010 she has co-edited with Sally Cline a series of nine books on writing for Bloomsbury, of which she and Sally co-wrote the first, Life Writing. She is currently interviewing and recording writers for the RLF podcasts, and writing a book on W.G. Sebald.