Alison Light is a full-time writer. She writes and broadcasts chiefly on issues to do with British cultural life, literature and history. She is currently Honorary Professor in the Department of English, University College, London and Honorary Professorial Fellow in the Department of English Literature at Edinburgh University. She is also a (non-stipendiary) Senior Research Fellow at Pembroke College, Oxford, and is affiliated as a Research Fellow at the Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities.

She was born in Portsmouth, UK and took a degree in English at Churchill College, Cambridge University. She then worked as a school teacher, as a studio manager at the BBC, and taught part-time in adult education. After gaining a doctorate from Sussex University she lectured in English at Brighton Polytechnic and at Royal Holloway College.

As the widow of the historian, Raphael Samuel, she spent several years helping to establish the Raphael Samuel History Centre and Archive: both are now flourishing in London.

Meanwhile she has written for the press, lectured part-time in English at University College London and as Professor of Modern English Literature and Culture at Newcastle University. She has also held Honorary and Visiting Professorships, most recently at Sheffield Hallam University and Newcastle.

Her last book, Common People (2014), was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson prize in non-fiction.

News

From February to April 2019 Alison will be a Visiting Research Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies in the Humanities, Edinburgh University.

Raphael Samuel Memorial Lecture 2016

Alison's lecture, Between Private and Public: Writing a Memoir about Raphael and Myself is now published in History Workshop Journal 83.
Listen to the podcast at History Workshop

Recent articles

A 'Diary' about the memoir Alison is writing can be found in London Review of Books, 2nd February 2017
A 'Diary' in London Review of Books
Alison writes about reading John McGahern's first novel The Barracks, remarkable - among other things - for its treatment of a woman with breast cancer in Slightly Foxed: The Real Reader's Quarterly, Issue 53, Spring 2017
Download A Lesson in Living (PDF)

Common People has been published in the US

Common People: In Pursuit of My Ancestors has been published in the US. Penelope Lively in the New York Times called it "The most powerful family history I have ever read."
And the Wall Street Journal hailed it as a "compelling portrait of a Britain in flux after the Industrial Revolution...full of moments where the public and the personal intersect to quietly devastating effect."
The Chicago paperback edition of Common People is now available.