Professor Marion Turner's biography of Chaucer (Chaucer: A European Life, Princeton 2019) has been shortlisted for the Wolfson History Prize 2020.
The judges called it “a quite exceptional biography that with imaginative insight and stylish wit, sets one of the most significant figures in English literary history firmly in a European context".
More than any other canonical English writer, Geoffrey Chaucer lived and worked at the centre of political life—yet his poems are anything but conventional. Edgy, complicated, and often dark, they reflect a conflicted world, and their astonishing diversity and innovative language earned Chaucer renown as the father of English literature. Marion Turner, however, reveals him as a great European writer and thinker. To understand his accomplishment, she reconstructs in unprecedented detail the cosmopolitan world of Chaucer’s adventurous life, focusing on the places and spaces that fired his imagination.
Find out more about the book on the Princeton University Press website.
See the other books shortlisted for the Wolfson History Prize.
