13 Facts About Christopher Bigsby

Christopher William Edgar Bigsby FRSA FRSL, was born on 27 June 1941 and is a British literary analyst and novelist, with more than sixty books to his credit.

Christopher Bigsby has won awards for his work on the American theatre, for his biography of Arthur Miller, for his first novel, Hester, and for his work in study abroad.

Christopher Bigsby holds honorary degrees from Bolton University and the Complutense University of Madrid.

Christopher Bigsby travelled widely for the British Council and chaired their Cambridge Seminar for eighteen years, an event which brought writers and academics from around the world to meet with British writers.

Christopher Bigsby has been a contributor to BBC Radio, presenting many programmes over the years.

Christopher Bigsby has written extensively on American theatre, and in particular has published widely on the playwright Arthur Miller.

In November 2008, Christopher Bigsby published the first volume of his biography of Miller, based on boxes of papers Miller made available to him before he died in 2005, as well as countless interviews and conversations during a friendship with the playwright that lasted over three decades.

Christopher Bigsby's work has ranged widely from a study of African-American writers, The Second Black Renaissance, to a work inspired by the work of his colleague W G Sebald: Remembering and Imagining the Holocaust: The Chain of Memory, a meditative study on memory and on the ways in which memory has operated in the work of writers for whom the Holocaust was a defining event.

Christopher Bigsby has written about Dada and Surrealism, British playwrights and popular culture but remains best known for his work on the American theatre, his three-volume Introduction to Twentieth Century American Drama becoming a standard work.

Christopher Bigsby followed this with Modern American Drama and Contemporary American Playwrights.

Christopher Bigsby has published a study of American television drama, Viewing America: Twenty-First Century Television Drama and three volumes on American playwrights who have emerged since 2000, Twenty-First Century American Playwrights, Staging America: 21st Century Dramatists, and American Dramatists in the 21st Century: Opening Doors.

Christopher Bigsby was the founder director of the Arthur Miller Centre for American Studies at the University of East Anglia whose International Literary Festival he has presented for twenty-eight years, and from which seven volumes of edited interviews have been published as the "Writers in Conversation" series.

Christopher Bigsby was the founder director of the British Archive for Contemporary Writing until 2018.