Hermione Lee is a British biographer, literary critic, and academic. She was President of Wolfson College from 2008 to 2017 and is Emeritus Professor of English Literature in the English Faculty at Oxford University. Her work includes biographies of Virginia Woolf (1996), Edith Wharton (2006) and Penelope Fitzgerald (2013, winner of the 2014 James Tait Black Prize for Biography and one of the New York Times' best 10 books of 2014). She has also written books on Elizabeth Bowen, Philip Roth and Willa Cather, an introduction to biography, and a collection of essays on life-writing, Body Parts. She was awarded the Biographers' Club Prize for Exceptional Contribution to Biography in 2018. She is a Fellow of the British Academy and the Royal Society of Literature, and a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2003 she was made a CBE, and in 2013 she was made a Dame for services to literary scholarship.
