Lisa Appignanesi (born Elżbieta Borensztejn; 4 January 1946) is a British-Canadian writer, novelist, and campaigner for free expression. Until 2021, she was the Chair of the Royal Society of Literature, and is a former President of English PEN and Chair of the Freud Museum London. She chaired the 2017 Booker International Prize won by Olga Tokarczuk. She is an Honorary Fellow of St Benet's Hall, Oxford and Visiting Professor in the Department of English at King's College London, and held a Wellcome Trust People Award there for her public series on The Brain and the Mind. Her book Mad, Bad, and Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors won the 2009 British Medical Association Award for the Public Understanding of Science, among other prizes. She has written for The New York Review of Books, The Guardian and The Observer, as well as making programmes and appearing on the BBC. Biography Personal life and education Appignanesi was born Elżbieta Borensztejn on 4 January 1946 in Łódź, Poland, the daughter of Hena and Aaron Borensztejn. Following her birth, her parents moved to Paris, France, and in 1951 emigrated to Montreal, Quebec, Canada, where she grew up. She studied at McGill University in Montreal, where she was a features editor for The McGill Daily. In 1966, she earned her BA and in 1967 her MA degree (with a thesis on Edgar Allan Poe) and married writer Richard Appignanesi. After their marriage the couple moved to England, where she obtained a DPhil degree in Comparative Literature at the University of Sussex in 1970. During this period she spent some time in Paris and Vienna, and wrote the thesis that became the book Proust, Musil and Henry James: femininity and the creative imagination, which was published in 1974. The couple had one son, film director Josh Appignanesi; they separated in 1981 and divorced in 1984. Her later partner, then husband, was John Forrester, Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at Cambridge, with whom she wrote Freud's Women. The couple's daughter, Katrina Forrester, is an assistant professor of Government and Social Studies at Harvard University. Lisa Appignanesi lives in London. Academic work After a year working as a writer in a Manhattan social research firm, Appignanesi returned to Britain to work as a European Studies lecturer at the University of Essex. She then lectured at New England College and in 1976 was one