Francis Spufford (born 1964) is an English author and writing teacher. His first novel Golden Hill received critical acclaim and numerous prizes including the Costa Book Award for First Novel, the Desmond Elliott Prize, and the Ondaatje Prize. In 2007 Spufford was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Career Spufford was chief publisher's reader from 1987–1990 for Chatto & Windus. He was a Royal Literary Fund fellow at Anglia Ruskin University from 2005 to 2007. He is a creative writing professor at Goldsmiths, University of London.
Spufford specialised in non-fiction for the first part of his career, but began a transition towards fiction in 2010. In 2016 he published his first novel, Golden Hill.
Spufford has also edited three anthologies: The Chatto Book of Cabbages and Kings (1989), The Chatto Book of the Devil (1992), and The Antarctic (2008).
Spufford has written an unauthorised novel set in the universe of C. S. Lewis's Narnia series, The Stone Table. The novel takes place between The Magician's Nephew and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Spufford distributed self-printed copies to friends. Writer Adam Roberts praised it as "a seamless recreation of Lewis's writing-style at its best". The author hoped to obtain permission from the C. S. Lewis estate to publish it commercially, but did not receive a response from the estate.
Personal life Spufford was born in 1964. He is the son of social historian Margaret Spufford and economic historian Peter Spufford. He recalls the influence of Tolkien's The Hobbit: "It turned me from a painstaking decoder of printed letters into someone flying through a new medium. Books have been portals for me ever since." Later influences include "The great American fantasist John Crowley, with his toymaker’s sentences, showing me you can hide the real subject of a story in the margins, in the spaces between chapters."
He studied English literature at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, receiving a BA in 1985. Spufford lives in Ely, Cambridgeshire, and is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
A former atheist, he is now a practising Christian and is married to an Anglican priest, Jessica Martin. The couple have two children. He served from 2015 to 2021 on the General Synod of the Church of England as a lay representative of the Diocese of Ely.
He wrote about his formative reading in the memoir The Child That Books Built. He proposed a canon of children's literature.
Awards Year Title Award Category Result Ref.1997I May Be Some Time Somerset Maugham Award — Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award — 2003 Backroom Boys Aventis Prize — 2010Red PlentyBSFA AwardNon-Fiction 2011 Orwell Prize — Ondaatje Prize— 2016 Golden Hill Books Are My Bag Readers' Award Beautiful Book Costa Book Award for First Novel— 2017Authors' Club Best First Novel Award— British Book AwardsDebut Novel of the Year Desmond Elliott Prize — Ondaatje Prize — Rathbones Folio Prize — Walter Scott Prize — 2018 Europese Literatuurprijs — RUSA CODES Reading AwardHistorical Fiction 2021 Light Perpetual Booker Prize — HWA Crown AwardsGold 2022Encore Award— 2024Cahokia JazzSidewise Award for Alternate HistoryLong Form
Published work
I May Be Some Time (1996) The Child That Books Built (2002) Backroom Boys (2003) Red Plenty (2010) Unapologetic: Why Despite Everything, Christianity Can Still Make Surprising Emotional Sense (2012) Golden Hill (2016) True Stories and Other Essays (2017) Light Perpetual (2021) Cahokia Jazz (2023) Nonesuch (2026)
References