A. N. Wilson


Andrew Norman Wilson is an English writer and newspaper columnist known for his critical biographies, novels and works of popular history. He is an occasional columnist for the Daily Mail and a former columnist for the London Evening Standard. He has been an occasional contributor to The Times Literary Supplement, New Statesman, The Spectator and The Observer.

Life and work

Wilson was born in Stone in Staffordshire to a father who became the managing director of Wedgwood, the pottery company. He was first educated at Hillstone School in Great Malvern, Worcestershire, and then at Rugby School from the age of 13, where he read Mao and Marx in his spare time. While at Rugby, he wrote an article for the school magazine arguing that public schools should be abolished. The national press became interested in the story, with the Daily Express headlining its account "Red rebel in Tom Brown's school". "Reporters arrived at the school gates, wanting to interview me, but my housemaster, wisely, would not let me talk to them", Wilson told Hunter Davies in 1993. After New College, Oxford, he taught English at Merchant Taylors' School, Northwood, for two years and then spent seven years as a lecturer in medieval literature at St Hugh's College and New College, Oxford. He married the Shakespearean scholar Katherine Duncan-Jones in 1971. They had two daughters, Emily Wilson and Beatrice "Bee" Wilson, and divorced in 1990.
A prolific journalist and author of non-fiction, Wilson has also written over 20 works of fiction, for which he has won the Somerset Maugham Prize and the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. His novels also include such historical works as The Potter’s Hand, Resolution, a fictional account of Captain James Cook's second voyage, and Scandal about the Profumo affair. His 2007 novel Winnie and Wolf, about the relationship between Adolf Hitler and Richard Wagner's English daughter-in-law, was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize. Novels set in the present include The Vicar of Sorrows, about a clergyman who has lost his faith dealing with the death of his mother, and Dream Children about paedophilia.
In the early 1990s, in the wake of the fatwa on Salman Rushdie and the continuing troubles in Northern Ireland, Wilson published a pamphlet, Against Religion, in the Chatto & Windus CounterBlasts series. He wrote biographies of Jesus and St Paul as well as a history of atheism in the 19th century entitled God's Funeral, describing its growth as due to influences ranging from David Hume to Sigmund Freud. These and many other of his books, such as those on Leo Tolstoy, C. S. Lewis and Hilaire Belloc, are simultaneously sympathetic to religious belief and critical of it.
In August 2006, Wilson's biography of John Betjeman was published. It was later discovered that another biographer, Bevis Hillier, had sent him a forged letter which was included in the book.
In 2001 Wilson published Dante in Love, a study of the Italian poet Dante Alighieri as an artist and philosopher, also depicting an in-depth portrait of medieval Florence to help readers understand the literary and cultural background which engendered the Tuscan's masterpiece, The Divine Comedy.
In addition to his many biographies, Wilson has written three books covering entire eras, The Victorians, After the Victorians and The Elizabethans.

Critiques of Wilson's work

of the Daily Telegraph said that "Wilson's forte is the character and he brilliantly conveys Betjeman's odd mixture of introspection and sociability, gaiety and melancholia, exhibition and self-disgust..."
In The Times, James Marriott called his book Resolution "a work of genius".
Kathryn Hughes wrote in The Guardian of Wilson's biography of Queen Victoria, Victoria: A Life, "Subtle, thoughtful... a shimmering and rather wonderful biography." Daisy Goodwin in The Sunday Times review stated that "This won't be the last biography of Victoria but it is certainly the most interesting and original in a long time."
Wilson's was criticised by the historian Richard J. Evans in a review in the New Statesman for factual inaccuracies, lack of original research and analysis as well as personal biases.
Wilson's biography Charles Darwin, Victorian Mythmaker, was criticised by John van Wyhe in New Scientist for confusing Darwin's theory of natural selection with Lamarckism at one point, as well as other scientific, historical and editorial errors. Kathryn Hughes in The Guardian described it as a "cheap attempt to ruffle feathers", with a dubious grasp of science and attempted character assassination. In The Evening Standard, Adrian Woolfson says that "while for the greater part a lucid, elegantly written and thought-provoking social and intellectual history", Wilson's "speculations on evolutionary theory" produce a book that is "fatally flawed, mischievous, and ultimately misleading". Steve Jones, an emeritus of University College London, commented in The Sunday Times: "In the classic mould of the contrarian, he despises anything said by mainstream biology in favour of marginal and sometimes preposterous theories." The geneticist and former editor of Nature, Adam Rutherford, called the book "deranged" and said Wilson "would fail GCSE biology catastrophically."

Books

Non-fiction

The Lampitt Chronicles
TitleSynopsisBroadcastBroadcaster
The Genius of Josiah WedgwoodWilson explores the life of his great hero, Josiah Wedgwood. As one of the founding fathers of the Industrial Revolution, Wedgwood was a self-made, self-educated creative giant, whose other achievements might be better known if he were not so celebrated for his pottery.19 April 2013BBC
Narnia's Lost Poet: The Secret Lives and Loves of C. S. LewisWilson, a biographer of Lewis, goes in search of the man behind Narnia – bestselling children's author, famous Christian writer, Oxford academic and an aspiring poet who never achieved the same success in writing verse as he did prose.27 November 2013BBC
Return to BetjemanlandWilson travels to a landscape of beautiful houses and churches, beaches and seaside piers, where he examines the life and work of the poet and broadcaster Sir John Betjeman.1 September 2014BBC
Queen Victoria's Letters: A Monarch UnveiledWilson explores the personal life of Queen Victoria through her journals and letters in this psychological portrait of Britain's longest reigning monarch.13 November 2014
20 November 2014		BBC
Return to LarkinlandWilson revisits the life and works of the poet Philip Larkin.Last shown 30 March 2016BBC
Return to EliotlandWilson revisits the life and works of the poet T. S. Eliot.8 October 2018BBC