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.
Robert Southey (1774 -1843) was an English Romantic poet, and Poet Laureate for 30 years.
He was a prolific letter writer, literary scholar, historian and biographer. Perhaps his most enduring contribution to literary history is The Story of the Three Bears, the original Goldilocks story, first published in Southey's prose collection The Doctor. His biographies include the life and works of John Bunyan, John Wesley, William Cowper, Oliver Cromwell and Horatio Nelson.