Francis Spufford FRSL (born 1964) is an English author and teacher of writing whose career has seen him shift gradually from non-fiction to fiction. His first novel Golden Hill received critical acclaim and numerous prizes including the Costa Book Award for a first novel, the Desmond Elliott Prize and the Ondaatje Prize. In 2007 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Early life Spufford was born in 1964. He is the son of the late social historian Professor Margaret Spufford (1935–2014) and the late economic historian Professor Peter Spufford (1934–2017). He studied English literature at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, gaining a BA in 1985. Career He was Chief Publisher's Reader from 1987–1990 for Chatto & Windus. Spufford was a Royal Literary Fund fellow at Anglia Ruskin University from 2005 to 2007, and since 2008 has taught at Goldsmiths College in London on the MA in Creative and Life Writing there. In 2018 he was made a professor. Publications Spufford specialized in works of non-fiction for the first part of his career, but began a transition towards fiction in 2010. In 2016 he for the first time published a book which could indisputably be classified as a novel. I May Be Some Time: Ice and the English Imagination, 1996 - won literary prizes including the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, Writers Guild Award for Best Non-Fiction Book of the Year, and the Somerset Maugham Award in 1997. The Child That Books Built, 2002 Backroom Boys: The Secret Return of the British Boffin, 2003 - nominated for the Aventis Prize Red Plenty, 2010 - longlisted for the Orwell Prize, and translated into Dutch, Spanish, Estonian, Polish, German, Russian and Italian, with versions in French and Turkish following. This is a fusion of history and fiction which dramatises the period in the history of the USSR (c.1960) when the possibility of creating greater abundance than capitalism seemed near. It is influenced by science fiction, and uses many of its tools, but is not itself science fiction. Unapologetic, 2012, translated into Dutch as Dit is Geen Verdediging, 2013, into Spanish as Impenitente and German as Heilige (Un)Vernunft!, 2014. Golden Hill, 2016 - won the Costa Book Award for a first novel, the Desmond Elliott Prize, the New York City Book Award of the New York Society Library, and the Ondaatje Prize. The novel was also shortlisted for the