Richard Holmes is our greatest living biographer. His biography of Shelley won the Somerset Maugham Prize. 'Footsteps' (1985) revolutionised the way biography was thought about and written. The first part of his biography of Coleridge won the 1989 Whitbread Book of the Year Prize. 'Dr Johnson and Mr Savage' won the James Tait Black Prize. The concluding volume of his Coleridge biography won the Duff Cooper Prize and the William Heinemann award. He is a Fellow of the Royal Academy.