Carole Angier

Carole Angier is the award-winning biographer of Jean Rhys, Primo Levi and W G Sebald. 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, plus reviewing and writing literary journalism for several national papers and magazines. 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 was associate lecturer in creative writing at Oxford Brookes (2011–2013). She was a mentor with Gold Dust for 10 years. 

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). From 2010-15 she 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. During that time she also interviewed and recorded many writers for the RLF podcasts.

Her very first biography, Margaret Hill, Pioneer of Care, which was privately commissioned, will be published by the Hornsey Historical Society in 2025 or ’26.

She is currently working on a memoir-biography of the author and editor Diana Athill, to be published by Bloomsbury in 2027. Diana was Carole’s editor and friend until she died at the age of 101. She edited all Carole’s books, except this one.