Francis Spufford


Francis Spufford FRSL is an English author and teacher of writing whose career has seen him shift gradually from non-fiction to fiction.

Early life

Spufford was born in 1964. He is the son of the late social historian Professor Margaret Spufford and the late economic historian Professor Peter Spufford. He studied English Literature at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, gaining a BA in 1985.

Career

He was Chief Publisher's Reader from 1987–90 for Chatto & Windus.
Spufford was a Royal Literary Fund fellow at Anglia Ruskin University from 2005 to 2007, and since 2008 has taught at Goldsmiths College in London on the MA in Creative and Life Writing there. In 2018 he was made a professor.

Publications

Spufford specialized in works of non-fiction for the first part of his career, but began a transition towards fiction in 2010 and published his first unambiguous novel in 2016.
He has also edited three anthologies: The Chatto Book of Cabbages and Kings, 1989, about lists used as a literary device, The Chatto Book of the Devil, 1993, and The Antarctic, 2008.
In March of 2019, it was reported that Spufford had written a novel, The Stone Table, set in the universe of C. S. Lewis’s Narnia series, during the time between The Magician's Nephew and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Spufford distributed self-printed copies to friends. The novel was praised as a "seamless recreation of Lewis’s writing-style", and Spufford hoped to obtain permission from the C. S. Lewis estate to publish it commercially. In the absence of permission, the earliest publication date would be 2034, seventy years after Lewis’s death, when the copyright on the original books expires.

Personal life

Spufford lives just outside Cambridge and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He is a practising Christian and is married to an Anglican priest, the Reverend Dr Jessica Martin, who is a Residentiary Canon of Ely Cathedral. In 2015, he was elected to General Synod as a lay representative of the Diocese of Ely.