Elizabeth Cook

Gibraltar-born and raised partly in Nigeria and partly in Dorset, Elizabeth Cook read English at Oxford, took a doctorate at the Warburg Institute and lectured at university level before turning to books of her own. She edited the Oxford Authors edition of John Keats, and in 1983 gave the British Academy's Chatterton Lecture, on the bravery of Shakespeare's sonnets. Achilles, published by Methuen in 2001, is the book that carried her name beyond scholarship. A shade over a hundred pages long, it compresses the Greek warrior's life into prose so pared down that reviewers argued over whether to call it a novel or a long poem. A whole chapter belongs to Chiron, the centaur who taught him, and the book crosses into the nineteenth century to end with Keats. A stage version won a Fringe First at Edinburgh and was later performed at the National Theatre. Her poetry collection Bowl followed in 2006, and the novel Lux, which reaches from the Hebrew scriptures to Tudor England, in 2019.