Ruth Scurr

Ruth Scurr is an historian, biographer and literary critic. She teaches history and politics at Cambridge University, where she is a Lecturer and Fellow of Gonville & Caius College. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Her first book, Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution won the Franco-British Society Literary Prize in 2006 and was listed among the 100 Best Books of the Decade in The Times in 2009. Her second book, John Aubrey: My Own Life, was shortlisted for the Costa Biography Prize and James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 2015. She reviews regularly for the Times Literary Supplement, The Spectator, the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal. She was a Booker Judge in 2007, a Samuel Johnson Prize Judge in 2014 and is a member of the Folio Prize Academy.