Vesna Goldsworthy

Vesna Goldsworthy is a novelist, memoirist and poet with many years' experience in teaching creative writing and English literature. She came to academia after a career at the BBC and she continues to produce and present radio programmes.

Her first novel Gorsky (2015) was the New York Times Editor's Choice and Waterstones Book of the Month, as well as being long-listed for the Baileys Prize and serialised as Book at Bedtime on BBC Radio Four. It has been translated into fifteen languages. Her second, Monsieur Ka (2018) was one of the Times' 'Summer Reads' choice of best new novels.

Her internationally best-selling memoir Chernobyl Strawberries (2005) was serialised in the Times and read by Goldsworthy herself as Book of the Week on Radio Four. The Crashaw Prize-winning poetry collection The Angel of Salonika (2011) was one of the Times Best Poetry Books of the Year, described by J.M. Coetzee as a 'welcome new voice in British poetry'.

Goldsworthy's Inventing Ruritania: the Imperialism of the Imagination (1998) is recognised as one of the key contributions to the study of Balkan and European identity. Described by Slavoj Zizek as an 'extraordinary book', and by the Washington Post as containing 'enough research to found an academic department', Ruritania is a much translated volume which continues to be taught at universities worldwide.