Ros Barber

Ros Barber is a novelist interested in history/biography and science/technology. Her critically acclaimed verse novel The Marlowe Papers (2012) was winner of the Desmond Elliott prize, joint-winner of the Author’s Club best first novel award and long-listed for the Women’s Fiction (Baileys) prize. Her speculative novel Devotion (2015) was shortlisted for the Encore award. Her poems have appeared in numerous anthologies including Faber’s Poems of the Decade (2012), now an A Level set text. Her second poetry collection, Material (2008), was a Poetry Book Society recommendation. Her stage adaptation of The Marlowe Papers, presented in the Brighton Festival Fringe, was shortlisted for a Broadway Baby Bobby award.

As a scholar of early modern literature and literary history, Ros has twice been joint-winner of the Calvin and Rose G. Hoffman award for a distinguished work on Christopher Marlowe. She is the editor and coauthor of 30-Second Shakespeare (2015), published in the US as Know-It-All Shakespeare and translated into several languages. She has presented papers at numerous academic conferences, most recently critiquing the methods of computational stylistics in Shakespeare (and Marlowe) attribution studies.

Ros studied biology at the University of Sussex before embarking on a career as a computer programmer. She began to teach creative writing at Sussex during the 1990s, and is now a lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her work for the RLF is part of a long-standing commitment to help others express their creative and critical ideas with greater concision and clarity.