Ros Barber

She has a BSc in Biology, an MA in creative writing, the arts and education, and a PhD in English literature, all from the University of Sussex. Her PhD was completed in 2011 with a dissertation titled Writing Marlowe as writing Shakespeare.^[3][4] She also has an Open University BA in English literature and philosophy.^[5]

Barber has worked as a computer programmer.^[6]

Barber's first novel, The Marlowe Papers (2012), is written in blank verse and was part of a PhD.^[7] She subscribes to the Marlovian theory of Shakespeare authorship, and is as of 2023 a director of research of the Shakespearean Authorship Trust.^[8][9] In 2013, she described herself as an "agnostic" on Marlowe as Shakespeare.^[10] In the book, Marlowe's death is a ruse and he writes plays in Shakespeare's name. The book won the Hoffman Prize,^[11] the Desmond Elliott Prize^[12] and the Authors' Club First Novel Award.^[13] Her second novel, Devotion (2015),^[14] was shortlisted for the Encore Award.^[15]

Together with Nicola Haydn, she wrote a one-man stage adaptation of The Marlowe Papers performed in 2016.^[16][17]

Of Barber's three volumes of poetry, Material (2008) was a Poetry Book Society recommendation.^[15] Its title poem, which also appears in the Faber anthology Poems of the Decade (2015), was in England's school sixth-form syllabus as of 2017.^[18]

As of 2021, Barber lectures in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her appointment ended in 2024.^[19]

She won the Hoffman Prize in 2011, 2014 and 2018.^[11][20][1]

Barber's parents, who were physicists, divorced when she was young. A brother of hers died of cancer.^[22][10]

Barber's first marriage ended in her mid-thirties.^[22][23] She later remarried.^[22]