# Patrick McGuinness

Patrick McGuinness (born 1968) is a British academic, critic, novelist, and poet. He is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Oxford, where he is Fellow and Tutor at St Anne's College.

## Life

McGuinness was born in Tunisia in 1968 to a Belgian mother and an English father of Irish descent from Newcastle-upon-Tyne. He grew up in Belgium and also lived for periods in Venezuela, Iran, Romania and the UK. He studied for a bachelor's degree at the University of Cambridge and a master's degree at the University of York before going on to a DPhil at the University of Oxford.

## Work

McGuinness's production is divided between literary criticism and fiction, memoir and poetry. His first novel, The Last Hundred Days (Seren, 2011) was centred on the end of the Ceaușescus' regime in Romania, and was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award and the Authors' Club Best First Novel Award; a French version was published under the title Les Cent Derniers Jours. It won the Writers' Guild Award for Fiction and the Wales Book of the Year. He won Wales Book of the Year a second time, in 2015, for his memoir Other People's Countries. His second novel, Throw Me to the Wolves, won the Encore Award for best second novel from the Royal Society of Literature. It is a fictionalised account of the murder of Joanna Yeates in Bristol in 2010, and the subsequent persecution and false accusations against schoolteacher Christopher Jefferies, who was McGuinness's English teacher at school in Bristol in the 1980s.

### Literary criticism and scholarship

Patrick McGuinness is a Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Oxford, and Fellow in French at St Anne's College, Oxford, formerly at Jesus College, Oxford. Among his academic publications there is a study of T. E. Hulme, an English literary critic and poet who was influenced by Bergson and who, in turn, had a strong influence on English modernism. He is the author of a book on the Belgian playwright Maurice Maeterlinck and modern theatre, and a book on poetry and radical politics in late 19th C France. He has also translated Stéphane Mallarmé, a major symbolist poet, and edited an anthology in French of symbolist and decadent poetry.
McGuinness edited two volumes of the Argentinian-Welsh poet and novelist Lynette Roberts, who was highly appreciated by T. S. Eliot and Robert Graves. According to McGuinness, Roberts "might fairly be claimed to be our greatest female war poet" whose work "constitutes one of the most imaginative poetic responses to modern war and the home front in the English language."

### Poetry, fiction and memoir

   Daytime Drinking
   First sip: gentle as a stream overreaching, supple as a rope-bridge in the air;
   The second, long as the creak of floorboards, firm as a leg-iron clasp;
   The third, sudden as the trap door beneath you, the rudderless slide back to thirst.
McGuinness published his first poetry collection, The Canals of Mars, in 2004. His poems have appeared in numerous anthologies and translated anthologies of British and Irish poetry.
Patrick McGuinness's first novel, The Last Hundred Days, was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2011. A thriller dealing with the collapse of communism, it is set in Ceaușescu's Romania, one of the most paranoid totalitarian regimes where spying on the citizens' private lives threatens all human relationships. The protagonist is an English student teaching in Bucharest, where McGuinness himself lived in the years leading up to the revolution.
In 2011, McGuinness was elected a Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales.
His memoir of childhood in the Belgian town of Bouillon, 'Other People's Countries: A Journey into Memory', appeared in 2014 and won the Duff Cooper Prize and the Wales Book of the Year, and was shortlisted for the Pen Ackerley Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.
In 2015 he published Poetry and Radical Politics in fin-de-siècle France: From Anarchism to Action française (Oxford University Press).
His second novel, Throw Me to the Wolves, was published in 2019 by Cape and won the Royal Society of Literature's Encore Award.It was also longlisted for the Crime Writers' Association (CWA)'s Gold Dagger Award. It is part detective thriller, part meditation on memory.
In 2021, he published Real Oxford, a personal book, part urban topography, part literary wander, about the Oxford beyond the classic university city.
He is the editor of 2-volume Penguin Book of French Short Stories, 2022.
His most recent book of poetry is Blood Feather, published by Jonathan Cape.
He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

## Prizes and awards

* 1998 Eric Gregory Award
* 2001 Levinson Prize, Poetry (Chicago) and the Poetry Foundation
* 2005 Roland Mathias Prize, shortlist, The Canals of Mars
* 2006 Poetry Business Competition, 19th Century Blues
* 2009 Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Palmes Académiques
* 2011 Costa Book Awards, shortlist, The Last Hundred Days
* 2011 Man Booker Prize, longlist, for The Last Hundred Days
* 2012 Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres
* 2012 Winner Wales Book of the Year for The Last Hundred Days
* 2012 Winner Writers' Guild Award for Fiction for The Last Hundred Days.
* 2012 Winner Prix du Premier Roman Etranger for French translation of The Last Hundred Days.
* 2012 Winner Prix Millepages for Les Cent derniers jours.
* 2012 Finalist of Prix Femina étranger for Les cent derniers jours.
* 2012 Finalist of Prix Médicis étranger for Les cent derniers jours.
* 2014 Winner, Duff Cooper Prize for Other People's Countries
* 2014 Shortlist, James Tait Black Memorial Prize (Biography) for Other People's Countries
* 2015 Shortlist, Ackerley Prize, Other People's Countries
* 2015 Shortlist, Gordon Burn Prize, Other People's Countries
* 2015 Shortlist, Jan Michalski Prize, Other People's Countries
* 2015 Winner, Wales Book of the Year for Other People's Countries
* 2016 Winner of the Gapper Prize for French Studies, for Poetry and Radical Politics in fin de siècle France
* 2017 Shortlisted for the Notting Hill Essay Prize for 'The Future of Nostalgia'
* 2020 Longlisted for the Crime Writers Association Gold Dagger for Throw Me to the Wolves
* 2020 Winner of Encore Award for Throw Me to the Wolves
* 2023 Winner of the Prix Triennal du Rayonnement des Lettres Belges, Prix Léo Beeckman, for contribution to the literature of Belgium.
* 2024 Shortlisted for the inaugural PEN/Heaney Prize for Poetry for Blood Feather
* 2024 Winner, Scott Moncrieff Prize for Translation, with Stephen Romer, for The Day's Ration: Selected Poems of Gilles Ortlieb