Selina Hastings

Selina Hastings is a literary biographer. She worked for 14 years as assistant literary editor on the Daily Telegraph and for eight years as literary editor of Harper’s & Queen.  She is the author of four biographies, Nancy Mitford, Evelyn Waugh, Rosamond Lehmann and The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham, as well as a number of books for children, including a complete retelling of the Bible. She is the winner of the Marsh biography prize (1993–4), the Spear’s special book award (2010) and the Biographers’ Club lifetime services to biography prize (2011).

Selina is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and was lecturer at the Heinz Foundation Conversazione at Lake Como in 1999; the visiting scholar at the Hawthornden Foundation in 1992 and 2000; the Invitée d’Honneur at the Colloque Internationale de l’Université Paris VII in 2001; and Mellon Fellow at the Ransom Research Center, University of Texas, during 2002–3. She has also been a judge of the Booker, Whitbread, British Academy, Spear’s and Duff Cooper prizes.