Richard Davenport-Hines is a British historian and literary biographer, best known for his biography of the poet W. H. Auden. He was educated at St Paul's School, London and Selwyn College, Cambridge. He was a Research Fellow at the London School of Economics, 1982?86, where he headed a research project on the globalisation of pharmaceutical companies. He was joint winner of the Wolfson Prize for History and Biography in 1985 and winner of the Wadsworth Prize for Business History in 1986. He now writes and reviews in a number of literary journals, including the Literary Review and The Times Literary Supplement. He is an adviser to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, to which he has contributed 157 biographies. He was a trustee of the London Library between 1996 and 2005, and has been on the committee of the Royal Literary Fund since 2007. He is a member of the Athenaeum Club, London and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature since 2005 and the Royal Historical Society since 1984. He was chairman of the judges of the Biographers? Club Prize in 2008, and of the judges of the PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize for History in 2010. 

June 21st, 1953 in London (Age 71)