Rosalind Barber (born 1964) is an English novelist, poet and academic.Forward Arts. Retrieved 27 October 2019. Her work include Material, a collection of poetry, and the novel The Marlowe Papers.
Education She has a BSc in Biology, an MA in creative writing, the arts and education, and a PhD in English literature, all from the University of Sussex. Her PhD was completed in 2011 with a dissertation titled Writing Marlowe as writing Shakespeare. She also has an Open University BA in English literature and philosophy.
Barber has worked as a computer programmer.
Novels Barber's first novel, The Marlowe Papers (2012), is written in blank verse and was part of a PhD. She subscribes to the Marlovian theory of Shakespeare authorship, and is as of 2023 a director of research of the Shakespearean Authorship Trust. In 2013, she described herself as an "agnostic" on Marlowe as Shakespeare. In the book, Marlowe's death is a ruse and he writes plays in Shakespeare's name. The book won the Hoffman Prize, the Desmond Elliott Prize and the Authors' Club First Novel Award. Her second novel, Devotion (2015), was shortlisted for the Encore Award.
Together with Nicola Haydn, she wrote a one-man stage adaptation of The Marlowe Papers performed in 2016.
Poetry Of Barber's three volumes of poetry, Material (2008) was a Poetry Book Society recommendation. Its title poem, which also appears in the Faber anthology Poems of the Decade (2015), was in England's school sixth-form syllabus as of 2017.
Academic position As of 2021, Barber lectures in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her appointment ended in 2024.Goldsmiths page. Retrieved March 29, 2025.
Awards and recognition She won the Hoffman Prize in 2011, 2014 and 2018. +YearWorkAwardResultRef2011The Marlowe PapersHoffman Prize2013Authors' Club First Novel AwardDesmond Elliott PrizeWomen's Prize for Fiction2014"Shortly he will forget to go"Hoffman Prize2015DevotionEncore Award2018"Big Data, Little Certainty"Hoffman Prize
Bibliography Novels The Marlowe Papers (2012) Devotion (2015)
Poetry How Things Are on Thursday (2004) Not the Usual Grasses Singing (2005) Material (2008)
Non-fiction 30 Second Shakespeare (2015) Personal life Barber's parents, who were physicists, divorced when she was young. A brother of hers died of cancer.
Barber's first marriage ended in her mid-thirties. She later remarried.
References
External links
Ros Barber at Royal Literary Fund Material Poem Analysis and Commentary The Bard didn’t use Warwickshire dialect – so was he really Shakespeare?, 2016 article by Barber at The Conversation