Alexandra Harris
Writer, teacher, literary critic, cultural historian
Photo: Geraint Lewis
Welcome. I enjoy thinking and writing about many kinds of art – from gardens, churches and Anglo-Saxon elegies to landscape watercolours and contemporary fiction. Most of all, I love reading. I am interested in the presence of the past, and in the conversation of writers and artists across centuries.
I am a Professor of English at the University of Birmingham, and was previously Professor of English at the University of Liverpool. With my colleague Jessica Fay, I run Arts of Place, a forum for new work on cultural histories of landscape, locality and environment. My research has been funded by the AHRC and by a Philip Leverhulme Prize.
In recent essays I’ve considered the art of Tacita Dean, Ivon Hitchens, and Dennis Creffield, and investigated historical attitudes to moving house. My radio work includes a series following Virginia Woolf’s walks, a ten-part ‘British History in Weather’, programmes on candlelight, fireworks, coldness, and an excursion to ask shepherds about pastoral literature. I review fiction and non-fiction, mostly for the Guardian, write cultural features, and lecture widely.
I am a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and have been a judge for the RSL Ondaatje Prize, the Royal Academy of Arts Wollaston Award, the Authors' Foundation Awards, and the Observer/Anthony Burgess Prize for Arts Journalism. I was chair of judges for the 2020 Forward Prizes for Poetry. I also chaired the 2024 Orwell Prize for Political Fiction, which was awarded to Hisham Matar for My Friends.
The Rising Down was published by Faber in 2024 and is now out in paperback. I’ve taken a small area – in the Arun Valley – and tried to discover how people at different times have inhabited, understood and expressed their surroundings. I’m interested in the way that memories or imaginings of places are layered onto each other; I've explored unwritten lives, eclectic sources, and physical materials (wood, flint, chalk, willow). Rather than following any established cultural canon, this book asks ‘who was here?’