A leading figure at the interface between science and literature, Gillian Beer is former President of Clare Hall College in Cambridge and a Fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Society of Literature. She has been twice a judge for the Booker Prize, the second time as chair.
Among her books are Darwin's Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (1983), Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter (1996) and Virginia Woolf: the Common Ground (1996).