Francis Spufford

Francis Spufford is a British writer born in 1964. He studied English at Cambridge and has worked as a book designer and editor before becoming a full-time writer. His nonfiction includes I May Be Some Time: Ice and the English Imagination (1996), The Child That Books Built (2002), Backroom Boys (2003), and Unapologetic: Why, Despite Everything, Christianity Can Still Make Surprising Emotional Sense (2012). Golden Hill (2016), his debut novel, is set in New York City in 1746 and follows a young man who arrives with a mysterious letter of credit and becomes entangled in the city's social and political life. It won the RSL Ondaatje Prize in 2017 and the Desmond Elliott Prize in 2017, and was shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize. Light Perpetual (2021) is his second novel, following five lives shaped by a V-2 rocket bombing of south London in 1944. Spufford is known for his meticulous research and his ability to inhabit the past with vivid sensory immediacy. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.