PEN Biography Prize Longlisting

Dr Mendelssohn, Associate Professor of English and Mansfield Fellow, has been long-listed for the eminent PEN American Center Biography Prize for her book Making Oscar Wilde, published in July this year. The PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award honours a “distinguished biography possessing notable literary merit which has been published in the United States during the previous calendar year”.

The book has been warmly reviewed both here – most recently reaching the Sunday Times ‘must reads’ of 2018 – and in the United States. Its compelling study of late Victorian society and its celebrity culture is arrived at through the persona of Oscar Wilde, and the book is considered a meticulous and lively engagement with Wilde (and his image creation) in the tumultuous year he toured the United States,1892.