Graham Robb

Who is Graham Robb?

Graham Macdonald Robb FRSL is a British writer and historian.

Robb was born in Manchester and educated at the Royal Grammar School Worcester and Exeter College, Oxford, where he studied Modern Languages. He graduated with first class honours in 1981. After qualifying as a teacher at Goldsmiths, University of London, in 1982, he earned a PhD in French literature at Vanderbilt University and was a Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford from 1987 to 1990.

He won the 1997 Whitbread Book Award for best biography and was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize for Rimbaud in 2001. Unlocking Mallarmé won the Modern Language Association Prize for Independent Scholars in 1996. His three biographies were all New York Times "Best Books of the Year". The Discovery of France won the Duff Cooper Prize in 2007 and the Ondaatje Prize of the Royal Society of Literature in 2008.

He has been a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature since 1998. In 2009, he became a Chevalier in the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. After the publication of the French translation of Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris, he was awarded the Grande Médaille de la Ville de Paris in 2012.