Christopher Bigsby
| Christopher Bigsby FRSA FRSL | |
|---|---|
|
Bigsby at the Writers' Centre Norwich in 2011 | |
| Born |
Christopher William Edgar Bigsby 27 June 1941 Dundee, Scotland |
| Alma mater |
Kansas State University University of Sheffield (B.A.) University of Sheffield (M.A.) University of Nottingham (Ph.D.) |
| Occupation | Academic, novelist |
Christopher William Edgar Bigsby FRSA FRSL (born 27 June 1941) is a British literary analyst and novelist, with more than forty books to his credit. Earlier in his writing career, his books were published under the name C. W. E. Bigsby.
Educated at the Universities of Sheffield and Nottingham, he is Professor of American Studies at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, United Kingdom. He is also an occasional contributor to BBC Radio, and presented Kaleidoscope (Radio 4) for eight years in the 1980s. During this time, he collaborated with the writer Malcolm Bradbury on the 8-part situation comedy serial Patterson, which followed the experiences of a new lecturer at a provincial university, and may have been partly autobiographical. Unusually this series was broadcast on Radio Three and remains the only sitcom ever to be aired by that station. His first book was Confrontation and Commitment: A Study of Contemporary American Drama, 1959-66 (1967). One of Bigsby's recent novels, first published in March 2002, is the well-reviewed Beautiful Dreamer. His latest novel is One Hundred Days, One Hundred Nights, published August 23, 2007 by Methuen (ISBN 0413776565).
Bigsby is also considered one of the world's best analysts of American theatre, and in particular the definitive commentator on playwright Arthur Miller. Bigsby's books on Miller include, but are not limited to, Remembering Arthur Miller (2005), Arthur Miller & Company (1990), The Cambridge Companion to Arthur Miller (1997), and the definitive work on the great American playwright, the 514-page Arthur Miller: A Critical Study (2005). In November 2008, Bigsby published Arthur Miller, a definitive biography of the eminent American playwright, based on boxes of papers Miller made available to him before his death in 2005, as well as countless interviews and conversations during a friendship with the playwright that lasted over three decades. Harvard University Press published the 739-page biography of Miller in the United States on 21 May 2009 and titled Arthur Miller 1915-1962.[1] The second volume of Bigsby's biography of the playwright, Arthur Miller 1962-2005, is scheduled for release in February 2011. Christopher Bigsby has also presented the University of East Anglia's International Literary Festival for over twenty years, from which four volumes of edited interviews have been published as the "Writers in Conversation" series (Volumes 1 and 2 first published by Pen & Inc in 2001 and Volumes 3 and 4 first published by Unthank Books in 2011).
In 2006 Bigsby published Remembering and Imagining the Holocaust: The Chain of Memory, a meditative study on memory and on the ways in which memory has operated in the work of writers for whom the Holocaust was a defining event. The book includes essays on Jean Améry, Tadeusz Borowski, Anne Frank, Rolf Hochhuth, Primo Levi, Arthur Miller, W.G. Sebald, Elie Wiesel and Peter Weiss
Bigsby was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2007.
References
- ↑ Dalya Alberge (2008-03-07). "Unseen writings show anti-racist passions of young Arthur Miller". London: The Times. Retrieved 2008-03-07.