Dr Ruth Scurr is a British writer, historian and literary critic. She teaches history and politics at Cambridge University, where she is a Lecturer and Fellow of Gonville & Caius College. She was educated at St Bernard's Convent, Slough; Oxford University, Cambridge University and the Ecole Normale Sup�rieure, Paris. She won a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship in 2000. Her first book, Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution won the Franco-British Society Literary Prize, was shortlisted for the Duff Cooper Prize, long-listed for the Samuel Johnson Prize and was listed among the 100 Best Books of the Decade in The Times in 2009. It has been translated into five languages. Scurr began reviewing regularly for The Times and The Times Literary Supplement in 1997. Since then she has also written for The Daily Telegraph, The Observer, New Statesman, The London Review of Books, The New York Review of Books, The Nation, The New York Observer, The Guardian and The Wall Street Journal. She was a judge on the Man Booker Prize panel in 2007, and the Samuel Johnson Prize panel in 2014. She is a member of the Folio Prize Academy. [More at Wikipedia]

January 1st, 1971 in United Kingdom (Age 53)