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Richard Holmes was born in London in 1945 and educated at Downside School and Churchill College, Cambridge. In 1974 his Shelley: The Pursuit won the Somerset Maugham Award and was described by Stephen Spender as 'surely the best biography of Shelley ever written'. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, was awarded an OBE in 1992 and the Biographers' Club Lifetime Services to Biography Prize in 2014. He lives in London and Norwich with the novelist Rose Tremain.
'An extraordinary glimpse into the nature of poetic genius and the heart of the Victorian miracle – no-one can match Holmes’ range and sensitivity' Rory Stewart ‘What a book this is. Embracingly humane with its motifs of stars and rocks, love and grief, friendship and rivalry, genius and doubt rippling out at beautifully orchestrated intervals. It is symphonic’ Adam Nicolson ‘An intimate and meticulous portrait … This is an outstanding work of scholarship, both of the poet and his craft and of the intellectually restless age in which he lived. It is, too, as you’d expect from this inspired biographer – engrossing, challenging and poignant’ Jim Crace ‘I have not been reading as much as inhaling The Boundless Deep. Richard Holmes’s Coleridge books have been my model for the best literary biography, but his Tennyson exceeds that. The writing and insights are the kind I would hope to find in a first-rate novelist' Amanda Craig
